


Solomon's Keychain

by mozaikmage



Category: Original Work
Genre: Camp Nanowrimo, Demons, F/F, gratutious meme references, science club
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 14:14:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 50,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12170523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mozaikmage/pseuds/mozaikmage
Summary: Girl summons demons from hell to do her science homework, wins medals and finds love along the way.Written for Camp Nanowrimo April 2017.





	Solomon's Keychain

Maisie Wong, age eleven, never intended to become friends with demons from Hell.

Her mother had dropped her off at the Pineborough Library after school one day so she could get books for her science fair project on stars. The kid’s section didn’t have anything very useful, though, so Maisie ended up wandering through the stacks and pulling out anything with an interesting title. She reached for a book called “The Life and Death of the Universe,” and as she did, another book-- thin, shabby, and, strangely enough, without a library call number on its spine-- fell out and landed on the floor in front of her.

In plain red text on a black cover, it read “The Lesser Key of Solomon.” Maisie flipped through it. 

“Demons? Demon summoning? Cool.” And so Maisie put it in her backpack without thinking too hard about it. She checked out some books and went home and did her homework without thinking about the demon book again.

Although...as she pulled out her math textbook and started studying for her test the next week, Maisie found herself glancing over to her backpack, and thinking that maybe there was a demon somewhere that could explain quadratic equations to her in a way that made sense.

“Is it me that’s thinking that?” she whispered, but pulled the book out and flipped it open anyway.

Maisie’s parents were out late that evening, so when she started drawing a summoning circle in chalk on the floor of her room, there was no one home to stop her. She found some tea lights and took the lighter from next to the fireplace, shut off the lights, and started to chant. 

Astaroth, Duke of Hell, appeared in a cloud of thick black smoke, ten feet tall, nude, with wings that filled the room, riding a hell-beast too terrifying to describe. Then he saw his summoner was an eleven-year-old girl who was completely and utterly unphased by this. He conjured a pair of pants.

“Mr. Astaroth? Hi, I’m Maisie. I read a book about how you can teach math to anyone who summons you? Well, I have a test next week, and I’m really confused about quadratic equations...It also says here you require something in exchange, and I have this really great pokemon card collection that I would be honored to give you for this help.”

Astaroth, Duke of Hell, wasn’t sure what he was going to say in response to this preposition, because what ended up coming out of his mouth was, “What is a pokemon card collection?”

_ What is this. Who is this child and how did she get ahold of the Lesser Key. _

But Maisie explained to him what pokemon cards were, so he explained quadratic equations to her, and two hours later Maisie could derive the quadratic formula all by herself.

“Well, if you don’t have any more questions, feel free to banish me. You have to banish me properly, you know, or part of my essence will be stuck here in the human world and that makes me feel weird- oh.”

The tiny human child wrapped her arms around his knees, in an attempt to hug this creature three times her size.

“Thank you very much for your help, Mr. Astaroth!” she exclaimed. Astaroth felt his face heat up.  _ What the fuck. _

“Uh. Yeah. Sure, kid. Feel free to summon me whenever.”

“I will!” 

Then Maisie banished him, properly, and the next week she got the highest grade in the class on her Gifted and Talented math test and her parents called the neighbors to brag about how smart she was. Her mom made fried dumplings, her favorite, and Maisie smiled and nodded throughout dinner before going upstairs to her room, closing the door, and taking out her book and some chalk.

She had to work on her science fair project, and she’d noticed the last time she went through The Lesser Key that Stolas, the prince of hell who looked like a big owl with long skinny legs, taught astronomy. So maybe he could help.

So Maisie summoned Stolas. Stolas, Great Prince of Hell did not appear in clouds of black smoke like Astaroth, but rather suddenly, like he was there all along and just decided to become visible when Maisie called him. Something about him reminded her of her English teacher.

“Mr. Stolas? I’m Maisie. It’s nice to meet you. I summoned Astaroth last week and aced my math test, tell him thank you for me if you can. I’m working on a science fair project on the life cycles of stars. Can you help me? In exchange, I’ll give you my limited edition DVD box set of Space Wars. I’ve already seen them all a bunch of times but if you have DVD players in hell you’re going to love it.”

“Yes, Maisie. I can help you.”

He reached out and gently took hold of her arm with one claw, and suddenly Maisie was in space, floating in the empty black void, surrounded by nothing.

“Are we IN SPACE? How can I still breathe? Is this magic? Are you doing magic? THIS IS SO COOL, OH MY GOD!”

“No, Maisie, we are not actually in outer space. I am projecting an illusion to help you understand the life cycles of stars. Here, we have a very clear view of both average and massive stars, at different stages of their existence. Now, do you know how stars are formed?”

What her book didn’t tell Maisie was, demon summoning was a hard habit to break. Why look for a tutor or ask friends for help when you can just draw a circle on the floor and have Hell itself tell you how to do your homework? After a few months, Astaroth gave her a pendant, a small, smooth bone as black as the abyss, and told her to hold it whenever she needed to talk to him or any of the other demons about things, so she didn’t even need to do the circle thing anymore.

Maisie learned that she really,  _ really  _ liked being good at math and science. And with such help, it was easy to be good at it. But while being great in school felt amazing, getting a 95 instead of a 100 or second place in Science Bowl instead of first felt like getting kicked off a cliff. 

Crying in a bathroom stall after a particularly rough Science Olympiad round, Maisie grabbed her pendant and whispered into it, “Why do I feel like this? It’s just for fun, nothing actually counts in middle school, why am I so upset? Why can’t I talk to my friends anymore without wanting to cry, why am I so sad and mad all the time?”

When they talked through the pendant, Astaroth’s voice was in her head instead of sounding in the air so others couldn’t eavesdrop, and Maisie sometimes wondered if they were really talking or if she was just imagining what he would say.  It rang through the back of her mind now. “Puberty, kid. Hormones. Remember health class? Yeah, that. But also, and I hate to be the one to say it but....Demonic interference is generally not very good for the development of young humans. You’ve been giving us things in exchange for our assistance, but what you didn’t realize is, summoning demons formally takes a little bit of your soul, a little bit of your stability, your mental balance, every time you do it.”

“But seeing and talking to you guys makes me feel  _ better, _ not worse,” Maisie said. “I understand you’re ancient primordial creatures of Hell, but I’d also like to think we’re friends?”

She could hear Astaroth’s low, rumbly laugh in the back of her head. “We sure are, kid. That’s why I’m telling you this instead of doing the honorable thing and letting you give away the rest of your soul by continuing to summon us this way. As much as I hate to admit it, you’ve grown on me, kid.”

“Thanks, Astaroth.” Maisie wiped her eyes and splashed some water on her face, and looked at herself in the mirror more carefully. Her skin was paler than it should be, with dark circles under her red, teary eyes. How much of that was competition and studying-related stress and sleeplessness, and how much of it was because of her...”extracurricular activity?”

Whatever. Maisie tied her hair back up and left the bathroom.

 

Maisie Wong, age fifteen, walked into school on the first day of tenth grade with a black pendant under her Pineborough High hoodie, dark circles hidden with carefully selected concealer, and a class schedule full of classes sophomores are not normally allowed to take at Pineborough. 

Her best friend since sixth grade, Leihai Chu grabbed her arm when she walked in and pulled her to the sophomore’s locker bay, where their other friends, Joshika Patel and Susan Wu had already gathered. “Maisie! Schedule!”

“I emailed you a screenshot yesterday,” Maisie protested, but took out her paper anyway.

“AP bio and AP chem? Do you enjoy death, Maisie?” Susan exclaimed.

“Yes,” Maisie deadpanned. “I live for it. Also, I see you have Chapman for English, so do I.”

“Different blocks though, damn.” Susan pulled out her planner and pencilled in everyone’s schedules in different colors on the first page, “for reference,” she always said. She did this every year. They’ve stopped questioning it.

“American history! Yes!” Joshi and Leihai high-fived. “Maisie, are you in AmHis honors?”

“Yeah,” Maisie said. She always took honors classes when they were offered. That’s how you became valedictorian. 

“Great, you can do my homework for me,” Susan joked.

“We’re all in the same study hall! Except Maisie’s going to be gone half the time because of AP labs, poor baby.”

“Better than nothing,” said Maisie. She had a sudden vision of all her friends becoming closer to each other instead of her, and her slowly drifting away until only science and math were her friends. Then again, they’d stuck with her this far, right? It’ll be fine, Maisie told herself. She adjusted the cord of her pendant absentmindedly.

They talked about their summers and the clubs they were in or planning on joining this year. Joshi decided to try for model UN this year.

“I need to get in shape, so I’m going to try out for ultimate frisbee,” said Leihai. “It could be fun, I don’t know.”

“Leihai! You know frisbee is a cult! Once you’re in, you never get out,” Susan warned her.

Leihai shrugged. “It could be fun,” she said again. 

The bell rang, stopping any further discussion on the cultishness of ultimate frisbee. The friends bid each other farewell and Maisie headed off to AP Biology.

Sophomores didn’t usually take AP Biology at Pineborough. Maisie had taken both biology and chemistry honors in freshman year with chemistry as her elective slot, filling the requirements needed to qualify for AP Bio in the first place. There were, as far as she knew, about five other sophomores also taking AP Bio this year. Maisie walked into room 203 and smiled at Dr. Louis, the bio teacher who also doubled as adviser for the science club. “Stick around after class, I have some materials to give you for the first meeting. Congratulations on secretary, by the way,” Dr. Louis said. Maisie nodded. 

In science club, officer positions were passed down by the previous holders to whoever they think could do a good job with it the next year, symbolized by the handing down of glass beakers and flasks covered in inspirational quotes. Radhika Sharma, now a freshman at MIT,  handed her the beaker at the end-of-the-year party the previous summer, saying, “With great power comes great responsibility,” and Maisie had looked at the beaker as though it would shatter in her thin, dry hands.

A quick glance around the room revealed that the only other sophomore in her class was this kid Akshay, who was kind of a jerk and a Frisbee Kid. The two of them didn’t really talk. She noticed Steve Lin, a junior and vice-president of the Pineborough Science Club, who was very smart and not a jerk, if kind of awkward. 

Maisie sat down next to him. “Hey, Steve. How was your summer?”

“Hi, Maisie. It was good. You?” Steve was tapping his phone under his desk, playing some mobile fantasy game. 

“Fine. Science club after school today, right?”

“Yeah. Are you gonna sign up for USABO this year?” USA Bio Olympiad was a national biology competition, although really it was just a long hard test that science club kids took every year to get points for college apps.

“Might as well, since I’m in this class, right?” Maisie didn’t say how she’d already started memorizing Campbell’s biology textbook over the summer. It wasn’t cool to try hard.

“Yeah.”

“Good mornin’. Do you mind if I sit here?” A voice asked. Maisie looked up. A girl she’d never seen before was looking at her with an anxious smile. She was...chubby, short, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, standing out in a class that was more than half East and South Asian. She was wearing a light blue dress with a peter pan collar, straddling the line between childish and retro-chic. Maisie was sure she had never seen this girl before in her life.

_ Are those colored contacts or are her eyes actually that blue?  _ Maisie thought.

“Uh, sure I guess. What’s your name?”

“Ellen! Ellen Pearson. Just moved here from Georgia. I’m a sophomore, I tested into this class, which was really surprising because we didn’t even have AP Bio in my old school.” Ellen sat down at the desk next to Maisie and started taking out her notebooks.

“Wow. I’m a sophomore too, and I took biology and chemistry honors last year.”

“Oh, wonderful! What classes do you have?” Ellen unfolded a printed out schedule and put it on Maisie’s desk.

_ What.  _ Maisie looked at Ellen’s schedule. She pulled out her own schedule. “I. Think we’re in all the same classes?”

“Isn’t that convenient! You can tell me all about how things work here.” Ellen beamed. Maisie fought the urge to look for a pair of sunglasses. 

“Yeah.” 

The bell rang, and Maisie looked away from the new girl and tried to focus.  _ Why is she in all my classes? How did she test into AP Bio when her school didn’t even have AP Bio? Why are her eyes so, so blue?  _

Maisie shook her head to clear it. She didn’t have time for any of this.

At lunch, Maisie went to the library. She chatted with some science club kids about classes, said hello to someone from volunteering, and then very quietly went behind the stacks and moved a half-size bookcase in front of her to make herself a tiny alcove. No one ever bothered her in her little alcove.

She scrunched down and whispered into her pendant. “Hey, Stolas. What do you know about Ellen Peterson?”

“Ellen Peterson...” Stolas’s voice was a current of molten steel, measured and steady and undeniably lethal, winding its way through her entire head. “She’s a Blessed Child. Her family inherited a guardian angel who helps her succeed, if she sticks to certain rules and restrictions. It’s called a Hereditary Angel Contract, or HAC, if you will.”

“So is she some kind of Jesus freak?” Maisie’s mother went to the Chinese church in town sometimes, and Maisie went through Sunday school as a kid, but really zealous evangelical people freaked her out.

“She has faith, Maisie, but she doesn’t need to subscribe to any sort of existing religious frameworks or institutions. Blessings don’t require the recipients to go to church, but depending on the contract, she could be banned from saying mean things to people, wearing certain clothes, and even eating certain kinds of food, in exchange for health and happiness and success and the ability to work hard to get what she wants. And when she has a child, this blessing will be passed down to the child and leave her.”

“So she’s like me, but for the other side? Are heaven and hell still opposing sides?”

Stolas chuckled. “You could say that. We are at peace, for both heaven and hell are needed to maintain balance in the universe.”

“Wild. Why is she here?”

“That, my child, I do not know.”

“Darn. Okay. I guess that’s it for now, thanks, Stolas. I’ll talk to you after school.”

Maisie waited for the pendant to grow cold, a sign that the demons weren’t listening to her anymore, and then said, very quietly, “what the fuck.”

“Why didn’t they tell me this was a thing that happened earlier? Why is she here? Is it because of me? Are we going to have to fight? I don’t know how to fight people, I’m a nerd. This is terrifying.” Maisie stuck her fist in her mouth and bit down to stop the flow of panicked, rapid words, and, not for the first time, wished she could talk to someone about this. 

She wished she’d told Leihai about the demons back when she first started summoning them and they were all children who believed in magic, not cynical overstressed teenagers. But sixth grade Maisie was a secretive person, and she’d decided to keep her supernatural tutors to herself. So when something demon-related was ripping her apart, the only person Maisie could talk to about it was herself. 

Maisie slowly counted to ten, checked her fist for bite marks, and climbed out from behind her barricade. She checked out a textbook she didn’t need and went back to her lunch table, where Susan was showing the table a video of a very small hamster eating a very small stack of pancakes.

“Doing homework already, Maze?” Sophie Klenova called. Sophie had been late to school that morning, but she was in more clubs than Maisie could count and probably knew the secret to being in three places at once. Where Maisie was pointy, excelling in one specific area, Sophie was as well-rounded as a circle. They were close once upon a time, but because of two very busy and rarely overlapping schedules, the two girls had drifted apart. Every time Maisie looked at Sophie, organizing events and winning debates and chatting with one of her hundreds of acquaintances, she wondered what could have been if she’d stuck closer to Sophie in middle school instead of Leihai.

“I didn’t finish the summer reading for American History,” Maisie lied. She had finished the reading, color-coded her notes and made flashcards in preparation for the legendary first-day test last month. 

“Bullshit,” Leihai said, “you just didn’t want anyone to ask you why you went to the library. Were you talking to Steeeeeeve?” She waggled her eyebrows suggestively, and Maisie felt a deeply unnecessary flush blossom on her face.

“We had to write the first meeting email and club fair stuff, calm down.”

“He’s in AP English Lang and he couldn’t write one email by himself?” said Joshika.

“ _ Yes,  _ because I’m the one who got the schedules from Dr. Louis after class today. He forgot.”

“On purpose,” said Leihai.

“Shut up.” Maisie stood her textbook upright and smashed her face down on the table behind it. “I don’t like Steve like that. If anything, I’m neutral on the existence of Steve Lin as a person.”

“Aren’t we all. The dude’s as interesting as a hyperintelligent piece of toast,” Susan said. “Our moms are friends, I should know.” Susan punctuated her sentence by pushing her chair away from the table, and went to the vending machine to get a soda.

Maisie followed. “That might be a little harsh...” she started to say, and then paused.  “Did you just say that so I’d defend him?”  
Susan, preoccupied with feeding bills into the machine, looked up at her. “No, he’s just boring. UGH!” The can got stuck. The two girls shook the machine a little, and two soda cans dropped to the slot below. “I mean, probably not boring for you, because you like science and stuff, but trust me when I say the only thing he knows how to talk about is science. And stuff. Do you want the second can?”

Maisie wrinkled her nose. “I don’t drink coke, but thanks. Ask the table?”

“Duh.”

They wandered back to the lunch table. “Maybe you’re right, Maze. Maybe it’s not that Steve’s boring, maybe he just doesn’t know how to interact with people very well, particularly girls,” Susan mused.

Maisie hummed in agreement. “Probably.”

The rest of the school day continued without too much incident. Ellen was fairly quiet in all classes, but did insist on sitting next to Maisie in all of them. They had study hall first block the next day, but would be spending it in an extended AP Bio class. Susan was in American History with them, and Maisie was forced to introduce them. 

“Susan, this is Ellen, she’s new from Georgia and in literally every single one of my classes somehow. Yeah, even AP Chem and Bio.”  Ellen smiled and lowered her eyes modestly, blushing and shaking her head just enough to convey humbleness.  “Ellen, this is Susan Wu, one of my close friends since middle school math class.”

“Wow, nerds. Nice to meet you. Are you going to join science club too, Ellen? Maisie’s secretary this year.”

“Gosh, I don’t know, maybe after I get used to the workload here,” Ellen said.

“The club fair’s next Wednesday, so you can find out more then,” Maisie said.  _ Did she actually just say “gosh?” Are we in the 1950s? I do not want her to join my club. _

The bell rang, and the talking quieted as the students all prepared for the test to make sure they did the summer reading.

After school, Maisie went back to the bio room for the science club meeting.

“Hey, Maisie! How was your summer? Mine was terrible, because college apps!” Salman Ahmed, Science Club president, greeted her with a smile and a sarcastic laugh. Everyone liked Salman. He was one of the few Nerd Boys with Social Skills, and no one doubted his abilities to get into a top college. 

“Hi, Sal. It was fine. What’re we talking about today?”

“Just the bake sale and club fair stuff. Our bake sale’s the week right after the club fair so we have to decide who’s bringing what now. It’s going to be a shorter meeting than usual though.”

“Why did we get such an early slot this year?” Clubs and organizations at Pineborough held weekly bake sales after classes ended to earn money, and a lottery determined which club sold food which weeks. Science club’s bake sale was always before their first competition, but it had happened in October the previous year, so this was unusually early. 

“Shitty luck? Whatever, we just have to roll with it.” Salman shoved his phone in his pocket and started scrawling on the white board.  

Maisie pulled out her laptop and opened her science club meetings note document.

“Hi guys.” Dominique Vasquez, senior, treasurer, beautiful, walked in. “Did we decide if we’re raising club dues this year?”

“It’s $5 for everyone who tries out, right?” said Maisie. “That’s what I wrote down here.”

“Sounds about right,” said Sal. 

The rest of the club slowly filed in, mostly friends of the officers or underclassmen hoping to become officers next year. Everyone else didn’t bother showing up to the first day.  A dozen or so people, in total. 

“Welcome back, nerds! Sign in on this paper here, and we’ll get started!” said Sal, and the meeting began.

After a few minutes, when they started arguing about who should design the posters for the club fair, the door creaked open again.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Is this science club? I was just looking for a place to study...” Ellen stammered, looking thoroughly mortified. 

Maisie hid her face behind her laptop screen.  _ Dude, stop talking and get out of here already,  _ she thought.

“This is a returning members only meeting,” said Dominique gently. “We’ll have a table at the club fair if you’re interested in learning more about science club later.”

“If you give me your email I can add you to the mailing list,” Maisie said, the words coming out almost automatically because of how often people asked her about the same thing.

“That would be just wonderful,” said Ellen, and started digging around in her backpack for a pen and paper.

Maisie could feel every eye in the room on her as she walked over to where Ellen stood and shoved the sign-in sheet at her. “Just write it down here. And if you’re looking for somewhere to study, the library’s open until 4:30.” 

Ellen wrote her email down in blue glitter gel pen and sealed it with a kiss. Secondhand embarrassment filled the room, but Ellen Pearson just smiled brightly and hurried out. 

The room was silent for a few seconds.

“What just happened?” said Steve, very quietly.

After the meeting, Maisie locked herself in a bathroom stall and asked her pendant why Ellen kissed the paper. “When a HAC kisses a sensitive document, the info can’t be used for evil purposes,” Astaroth responded, sounding amused.

“Can I do any cool tricks like that?”

“I can possess you and make your head spin around 360 degrees, if you want,” he suggested.

“Never mind.” Maisie broke the connection and stood up. It had been, she felt, an unreasonably long first day of school.

Maisie said goodbye to her science club friends and started walking to her house, a few blocks away from the high school. 

“Hey, Maisie!” She turned around. Ellen was walking right behind her, again, for some strange, terrible reason.

“You again,” Maisie grumbled, then forced a smile onto her face. “What, do you live in my house too?”

Ellen laughed. “I live in Meadow Park! Do you?”

“Yes.”

Ellen smiled and tilted her head up at Maisie, in a way that Maisie was prepared to swear had been carefully practiced and cultivated for maximum charm. “I guess the universe just wants us to be friends,” Ellen said.

“Great,” Maisie said.  _ Get out of my life,  _ she wanted to say.

They passed Pineborough Park, and Maisie could see Leihai playing frisbee with the rest of the Ultimate team in the meadow there. For a moment, she wished she was playing frisbee too. 

The sidewalk turned sharply right, perpendicular to a set of weedy, abandoned train tracks. “It’s shorter if we follow the tracks,” Maisie said. “That’s how I always go at least.”

“Thanks, Maisie!” 

The ground rumbled, and for a second Maisie thought the tracks weren’t abandoned after all and they were both going to get run over by a train and die. She and Ellen stopped walking. The air thickened into a mist and swirled. Out of the fog, two huge shapes emerged. A glowing, winged wheel, and Maisie’s demon tutor Astaroth.

“Good afternoon, girls,” the wheel said. “I’m Barachiel, Ellen’s guardian angel.”

“Sup,” said Astaroth. “Astaroth, Grand Duke of Hell. Maisie used to summon me to help her with her homework. Not just me, of course, but everyone else was busy right now.”

“Why are you here?” Ellen exclaimed.

“What the fuck is going on,” Maisie said.

“I’m sure you were both wondering why you were suddenly in the same school, and classes, and neighborhood,” Barachiel began. “It’s because someone in heaven-- probably not the Big Guy Himself, but someone important-- decided it was time to test whether an angelic blessing could help a person more in school than demonic assistance. So the two of you will be competing in a series of tests, both in and out of school. Every project and graded assignment you do for a class will also count as part of this competition.”

“Winner gets to keep their supernatural advisor, loser loses theirs,” Astaroth finished.

Maisie just stared. “What? A competition? That’s not fair! You haven’t been helping me since 7th grade! Everything I’ve accomplished since then I’ve done myself!”

For once there was something resembling a frown on Ellen’s cheerful face. “You think I don’t do my own work? My blessing just gives me the focus and motivation I need to succeed. I work hard too! I like biology and science, and I think learning is fun!” She looked away for a moment. “I want to make my parents proud.”

“Nope. Nope, no way. I am not here for this. Math and science competitions are stressful enough, this is just unnecessary.” Maisie attempted to push past the two supernatural beings, but they both stood firm. “Let me leave!”

Astaroth put a large hand on her forehead, and Maisie felt worms crawling all over her internal organs. She supressed a shudder. “How about a compromise?” Astaroth said, in his best attempt at a calm and reasonable tone of voice. “Instead of making every test competitive, it’s just midterms and finals, and a few outside-of-school trials.”

Barachiel pulled a notepad out of his sleeve and scribbled on it. “I’ll talk it over with management and keep you all updated, but I don’t see why not!”

The four of them stood there, in the middle of the tracks, waiting for something else to happen.

“Well, I guess that’s it for now,” Barachiel said eventually. “We’ll talk to you both later! Best of luck!” 

He and Astaroth vanished. Maisie started walking again, faster this time.

“Wait up! I’m still new, I don’t know where to go!” Ellen panted, catching up. Maisie slowed down, just a little.

They walked in silence.

When they reached their neighborhood, Ellen shuffled her feet a little. “Would you...like to come over, maybe? Talk about this whole contest thing, do homework?”

Maisie stopped walking and glared at her. “Please just leave me alone.”

She slammed the door on her way in.

There wasn’t a whole lot of homework on the first day of school, but Maisie couldn’t concentrate on it anyway. She pulled up her password-locked journal document and typed a long entry about everything that happened so far, ending it with “I don’t need this extra stress in my life, but on the other hand, I don’t want to lose.”

Her mother came home from work an hour later. “Welcome home,” Maisie said, in Mandarin.

“How was your first day, darling?” Her mother asked, putting a bag of groceries on the kitchen table for Maisie to help sort. 

“It was fine. Science club is having a bake sale in two weeks, we need to bring something.” Maisie filled the electric kettle with water and switched it on without thinking about it. Making a cup of tea for her mom and herself after work was part of their daily routine.

“I’m going to Costco on Sunday, I can get something then.” Maisie’s mom looked over at her appraisingly. “You know, that Liao boy’s already taking SAT prep classes. Don’t you think you should start those soon?”

“I don’t think we need to waste the money. I’m good at studying, I can just do practice tests by myself. Maybe next summer.” She pulled two mugs out of the cupboard, and two teabags of instant green tea.

Her mom smiled. “You’ve been top of your class for four years now, so I trust you. But don’t let your science competitions distract you from your schoolwork.”

“When have they ever?” Maisie poured the tea.

In health class the next day, the block right before lunch, Ellen was partnered with Stephanie Schwartz, cheerleader and choir singer. Stephanie was smiley and friendly and asked Ellen about Georgia, then said the magic words: “Wanna eat lunch with me and my friends?”

Ellen smiled and said, “Sure!”

She and Maisie hadn’t spoken all day, Maisie determined to ignore her, Ellen determined to focus on her education. It didn’t seem fair of Maisie to take her anger out on Ellen, exactly, but it gave her a reason to try and make more friends. And Ellen always looked on the bright side of things.

So she followed Stephanie to her lunch table, in the back of the cafeteria near the Junior Zone. The cafeteria was informally and unofficially divided into four zones for the four grades, and everyone followed the rules for the most part. Sure, some juniors ate lunch with seniors, and underclassmen dated upperclassmen sometimes, but you’d never find a table of all sophomores inside the Junior area. 

Stephanie bought a salad from the cafeteria, but Ellen had brought her own lunch, carefully prepared the night before. A pulled pork sandwich, some grapes and a fruit cup. Fairly balanced and healthy, she’d thought then.

Now, Ellen could see the calories and fat and salt and sugar that made up her meal, and was rapidly reevaluating.  _ Of course these girls would be the diet types, look how skinny they are, you did this to yourself. _

A short, springy girl with red hair sat down, holding a sandwich wrap. “Are you Ellen? I’m Madison, it’s nice to meet you. Are you into music at all?” Madison was wearing a t-shirt that said something about cheerleaders fighting cancer.

“I like to sing,” Ellen said, shyly. “I thought about joining choir, when I was signing up for classes.”

Madison perked up. “You totally should! There’s still time to switch classes, just go to the guidance counselor. There’s no tryouts and we get to go on field trips and it’s really fun.”

“Madison is overly enthusiastic,” Stephanie said, rolling her eyes affectionately. “But actually, our choir’s pretty cool. We go to this annual competition at Six Flags, it’s great.”

A few more girls joined their table, and asked Ellen about herself. She got the distinct impression that she was being interviewed for something, but tried not to think about it and picked at her grapes. Her sandwich remained untouched.

“Ugh, I am so fat,” Samantha complained, stabbing at a wilted piece of lettuce like it personally offended her. Ellen slid down slightly in her seat.

“Sam, aren’t you underweight? Shut up,” Stephanie said. Ellen stopped sliding down. Then: “I’m the one who’s really fat here. I need to lose at least five pounds before homecoming if I want to pull off a bodycon dress.”

Ellen briefly wondered how many pounds she’d have to lose to pull off a bodycon dress. If they even made bodycon dresses in her size. She felt nauseous. “It’s been lovely meeting y’all, but I just remembered I have to do something right now. I’ll see you all later,” she said. 

“Nice to meet you too! Join choir!” Madison waved. She ate her sandwich in the stairwell of the science wing, where no one could see her, then made her way to the library.

She could see Maisie working with those other science club kids on something in the computer bay. After a moment, Ellen steeled her shoulders and made her way over to them.

“Hey, Maisie, I was wondering- do you know how to change classes?”

Maisie looked away from the screen and Ellen could see they were playing some online game, not doing work. She smiled slightly.

Maisie narrowed her eyes. “Why, AP bio and chem too much for your southern heart?”

“What’s that supposed to mean? No, I just wanted to switch from French to Choir. You only need two years of languages to graduate, right? I’ll just take it next year, and do something fun this year.”

Maisie looked up and to the left, as if she was working out the schedule change in her head. “It depends on if the two classes are at the same time, but it could work out. Just go to the guidance department and ask. It’s next to the main office. You know where that is, right?’

Ellen nodded. “Thanks a bunch.”

“No problem.”

And with that, Maisie turned back to their game. “Go LEFT, loser!” she shouted, and the other guys laughed, and the kid in Ellen’s bio class put his hand on Maisie’s shoulder, just for a second. Ellen wondered if they were a thing. She looked away.

“Okay, we need to work out the tryout schedule, for real this time,” Maisie was saying, laughter still in her eyes. Maisie was as tall and thin as the white girls Ellen ate lunch with, but on her it seemed natural, graceful. Ellen was sure Maisie ate whatever she wanted and just happened to be skinny. She wasn’t jealous. 

Maybe a little.

“Whatever,” Ellen muttered, shaking her head a little to clear it. She had to get to the guidance department anyway.

The club fair happened during lunch the next week, and it was absolute mayhem. Maisie snuck out of her last class before lunch a little early so she could buy something to eat, then had to sprint to the bio room for their posters and flyers and email sign-up sheet, then to the gym to set up. About five minutes after that, the room was packed. Completely and totally. Unfortunately for Maisie, the Science Club table in particularly was mobbed by overeager freshmen who did science club in middle school and expected high school to be just as fun and easy as it was back then. Overeager freshmen  _ boys  _ that ignored Maisie when she answered their questions and bothered the boys at the table instead.

“The first try-out is treating the girls in STEM clubs and classes as people and you all failed,” she finally snapped. “Either listen to me when I tell you what you asked about, or leave.”

“Dude, chill, they’re just freshmen,” Steve said, patting her gently on the shoulder. She smacked his hand away.

“That’s exactly why they should learn how to not be sexist pricks now,” she explained. “And I was a freshman just last year, so what does that make me?”

“I keep thinking you’re a junior,” said Sal. “Too many APs, nerd.”

“Shut up. I am getting the world’s worst migraine,” Maisie grumbled. “Where’s Dominique?”

“She has her Princeton class today,” Sal said distractedly. When students went through the entire curriculum in a subject before their senior year, they could take a class in that subject area at Princeton University senior year in exchange for giving up all their afternoon classes. Which Dominque did, because Princeton was her top choice college. A lot of things revolved around college in Pineborough High School.

“Hey Maze, it’s your new friend,” Steve called, grinning. 

“She’s not my-” Maisie started to protest, and then realized that might be kind of rude. Ellen had made her way to their table. She flashed a quick smile in Maisie’s general direction and signed her name and email gracefully on the sign-up paper. In blue glitter gel pen, again.

“If she makes the team, she’ll have to be your friend,” Steve said.

“Bullshit. Rish is on the team and I still think he’s terrible,” Maisie snapped back. Rish was a kid who made fun of Maisie in middle school and never really apologized for it, and was thus irredeemably terrible in her eyes. He was competent at what he did, she’d concede, but as a person, she could not stand him.

“Do you think she’ll make the team, though?” Maisie asked him, as quietly as she could manage in the cacophony of the club fair.

“Depends on what events she tries out for,” Steve said. “We’ve only been in the same bio class for two weeks, so I don’t know if I’m the best judge of that.”

Maisie shrugged. She had no idea what Ellen would try out for, since she’d been deliberately resisting any attempts at conversation from her. She did not want to be friends with this girl she had to compete against, even though she still didn’t know what the first trial was going to be, or when. 

She wanted to win.

“I’m doing Astronomy this year, right?” She asked instead, handing a flyer to some kid in enormous coke-bottle glasses. 

“You have to try out like everyone else but probably, yeah. Do you know what you want to do for your second event?”

“Rocks and minerals? I signed up for it.” Stolas knew a lot about rocks and minerals, and he could help her, Maisie thought.

“Nice.” Steve always did physics-related events. He won some big physics competition the summer before, apparently, though he never bragged about it. 

The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch. “Our interest meeting’s on Thursday, and tryouts start the week after!” the officers shouted, throwing some flyers at the crowd still around their table. The email list had extended to a second page, but from Maisie’s experience, half of the people who signed up wouldn’t bother coming to the first meeting, and half of those would drop out before tryouts.

 

The weeks passed quickly, and after the mildly stressful experience of writing and organizing the tryout tests and then actually taking those tests, the Science Club officers announced the final team roster and who would be doing which events.

“....Tim, Rocks and Minerals and Disease Detectives. Maisie, Astronomy. Ellen, Invasive Species. Maisie and Ellen, Write it, do it,” Sal recited.

Maisie was on her feet immediately. “NO. I refuse to do Write It Do It. I didn’t even try out for WIDI! How did I get stuck with it?” With Ellen, she wanted to say. _ How did I get stuck with Ellen? _

“Well,” said Sal, looking uncomfortable, “No one wanted to do it, but you did it last year with Radhika, and you guys did pretty well, so I figured you wouldn’t mind doing it again.”

“You could’ve  _ asked,  _ asshole! WIDI is a terrible event and whoever invented it should be shot. I hated it.”

Dominique stepped in suddenly, fixing Maisie with a steely gaze that made her stomach drop.  “The only other thing you tried out for was Rocks and Minerals, and Tim outscored you in that, so we put you in a second event we knew you could do well,” she said clearly, never breaking eye contact. Maisie suddenly remembered that even though officially Steve was vice-president, in practical terms Dominique was the shadow leader behind Sal’s bubbly exuberance.

Maisie swallowed. “That’s fair. I’m sorry for freaking out on you guys.”

“Can someone explain to me what y’all are talking about here? What’s write it, do it and why do you hate it so much?”

“Write it do it is an event where one person is given a simple structure, like a lego building or something, and has to write directions for the other person explaining how to build that exact structure, and then the other person has to rebuild it only based on those directions, without being able to see the original thing. There’s a lot of trust and communication involved, making it really difficult and annoying.”

Ellen let out a low whistle. “Yikes!”

“If you’re done whining, I’m still reading the events list,” Sal complained, shaking the paper at them. Ellen sat down in her spot in the very front row, blue glitter gel pen at the ready.

Maisie slipped out and went into the bathroom, grabbing her pendant. “Astaroth, did you know about this?”  
“Did I know about what?” the grumbly voice replied. If Astaroth was not a demon from Hell, Maisie would say he was trying to sound innocent, but he did not have an innocent bone in his body and they both knew it.

“Write it, do it! I know you were listening, I can feel you in the back of my head whenever Ellen and I are in the same room!”

“Ah. That. Well. Barachiel and I talked about it, and I’ve decided it would be an excellent way for you to get to know your enemy better. Learn her weaknesses and destroy her where it counts. That sort of thing.”

“I don’t want to,” Maisie said, aware she sounded like a five-year-old child being told to clean her room. “I don’t want to spend more time with her than absolutely necessary but an event like this means we’ll have to practice together for hours after school. And I can’t let us lose by not practicing, because I want to win! And you want me to win!”

_ Breathe in, breathe out, count to ten.  _

“Did you really put the idea in Sal and Dom’s heads?” she asked after a moment. 

The low, rumbly chuckle that followed warmed her like a fireplace in winter. “They were already going to make  _ you _ do it, I just nudged them towards Ellen. And I barely even had to nudge.”

“At least she has to do invasive species.” Maisie smirked. “Did I tell you about invasive species? You have to memorize so much crap, and there’s no official list or study guide, you just have to learn all the invasive species you can and hope they’ll be on the test. She’s gonna die.”

“If she’s anything like you, kid, I’m sure she’ll do just fine.”

“She is  _ nothing  _ like me,” Maisie snapped, and cut the connection. The whole thing with the pendant controlling her connection with demons was merely a formality, a way of giving Maisie the illusion of control. She could feel Astaroth’s presence in the back of her mind, large and warm and weighted, like a sleeping dragon, listening, observing, but not saying anything. It made her feel, against all odds, safe. Protected.

Maisie returned to the meeting, twisting the cord of her pendant around and around in her hands.

After the meeting, Ellen walked home with her again. She didn’t say anything at first, just walked in silence next to Maisie. Her walk was slightly faster than Maisie’s, and Maisie noticed that Ellen was a full head shorter than she was.

“Do your parents know?” Ellen said, suddenly, as they crossed the road.

“Know about what?” Maisie said.

“The demon thing,” Ellen lowered her voice, slightly.

“I never told them but I never really tried to hide it from them either.”

Ellen merely nodded. “My angel thing’s hereditary. My mom had it before me, and when I have a kid, the kid will get it, too. I have to be the perfect child and go to Wellesley like my mom and study political science and be a senator, probably. Or a neurosurgeon. Senator or neurosurgeon, she says. Sometimes I think she’s kidding.”

Maisie snorted. “My parents never gave me any specific expectations. Just, success, in the abstract. Mostly they want me to do better than the neighbors’ kids.”

“An admirable goal,” Ellen quipped. She stared at the ground, at the leaves and pinecones crunching beneath her feet. “My parents have already started putting together a study program to drill me into winning the competition, even though they’re not supposed to. They like to win.”

“And you don’t?”

Ellen stopped walking and looked up, at the red leaves tumbling off a tree onto the road ahead of them. “I like making my parents proud,” she said simply, and that was that.

 

Leihai made the Ultimate Frisbee team and invited Maisie to their first home game of the year.

“Oh my god, you actually showed up! I’d hug you but I am way too sweaty to be allowed out in public. Did you see me out there? I actually caught the frisbee, like, multiple times!” Leihai panted, grabbing her water bottle from Maisie’s hands.

“You were great, Lei,” Maisie smiled.

“Dude, we like, never hang out anymore, it’s weird,” Leihai said. “Like last year I’d come over to your place every weekend and now you have homework and science club and I have homework and frisbee and I blink and suddenly I don’t remember what your voice sounds like on account of not hearing it for months on end.”

“Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” Maisie said. “But also I agree. Do you want to get brunch at the pancake place next weekend?”  
“I have a game Saturday, but I could do Sunday at like eleven? Let me write it down.” Leihai pulled out her phone and tapped the date into it.

“Okay, so next Sunday at eleven it is.”

“Lei, we’re going to go get pizza, you in?” a frisbee boy yelled. The team was packing up around them.

“Of course,” Leihai shouted back. “I gotta go, but I’ll see you later, yeah?”

Maisie grinned. “Yeah,” she said, and it sounded like a promise.

 

After the game, Ellen came over to practice for write it do it.

“Mom, this is Ellen, my partner for Science Club. We’re going to be studying for a while.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Maisie’s mom, in accented English. “Do you girls want a snack? Are you staying for dinner, Ellen?”

Ellen shook her head, smiling politely, and they went into Maisie’s room.

“Your room is cute,” Ellen said, looking around. There was a large, red square rug in the middle of the room, covering up years of carefully-drawn chalk circles.  A desk in front of the window with Maisie’s laptop, textbook and notes haphazardly piled onto it, an organization system that she’d swear up and down made sense to her but not to anyone else. A bookshelf by the window, overflowing with books, with trophies and medals piled on the very top.

“Not a lot of photos,” Ellen added.

“I don’t really like taking pictures. Or being in them,” Maisie pulled the bag of Write it Do it Materials out from under the desk, then looked at the desk again, more critically this time. “Let’s work on the floor,” she decided. Ellen hid a smile. 

“Okay, do you want to write or do?” Maisie asked.

“We should both try writing and doing, to see who’s better at what. But I think I’d rather write first, if it’s all the same to you,” Ellen said.

“Sure. I don’t like writing anyway. In this bag there’s a few cardboard boxes, each box has a thing in it. As the writer, you need to write out for me how to build the thing, and then I need to build it following your directions. You can use abbreviations and shorthand, but you can’t draw anything or use any symbols that aren’t found on a standard keyboard. With Radhika, my last partner, we used certain words to indicate direction and orientation, but I don’t want to like overwhelm you with information so we can just start now and see how it goes.”

“That’s considerate of you,” Ellen puffed out a half-laugh. 

Maisie flushed. “I don’t  _ hate you,  _ you know. Sorry if I’ve been kind of rude, it’s just... a lot of things. Anyway, we need to work together, so just.” She picked a box out of the bag and threw it in Ellen’s general direction, and Ellen giggled.

After that, they started meeting every Saturday to practice, and eventually to study for their other classes. “Keep your enemies closer,” Astaroth whispered to Maisie, and she rolled her eyes in response.

The first trial was held the first Saturday in October, so that the amount of time they’re forced to work together didn’t contaminate the results of the experiment.

Maisie had opened her front door, about to go to the library for the day, when the air around her twisted and darkened, trapping her in a tiny personal thunderstorm. “Oh what the fuck,” she tried to say, but the wind whipped the words out of her mouth. 

She landed on what looked like a game show set, except the seats for the audience were all empty. The only other person in the room was Ellen, in shorts and a t-shirt, looking equally confused behind her own podium. A pillar of light took the place of the host.

“Welcome, girls, to the first Trial,” it said, or something said. The booming voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once.

“I was in the middle of exercising,” Ellen complained. She had a plastic water bottle in one hand.

“Well, now you get to exercise your brains instead,” said the voice. The pillar of light flared briefly, and a scoreboard lit up behind them. 

MAISIE: 100

ELLEN: 96

“These points are based on your performances in classes,” the voice said. “We’ll be asking you questions in several categories.”

The scores shrank down to the edge of the screen, and the question categories expanded to fill it. Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Geometry, Pre-Calculus, and something called “culture” for the last category.

Maisie suppressed a groan. “It’s jeopardy. We’re literally playing jeopardy.”

“Jeopardy is copyrighted,” the voice said, amused. “We’re playing a question and answer game of the kind typically found when reviewing for tests and exams.”

Maisie rolled her eyes. Ellen snickered.

“Are you both ready? Then let’s begin!”

The math and science questions were about as difficult as the material they’ve been learning in class so far, so neither of them missed questions. When the only category left was culture, Ellen hesitantly called out, “Culture for 100.”

The light flared, and a voice boomed out. “This pair of Shakespearean lovers died tragically young.”

“Who are Romeo and Juliet?”

“Correct.”

“Culture for 500,” Maisie yelled.

“This author wrote the novels A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, among others.”

“Who is Charles Dickens?”

“Correct.”

“These culture questions seem suspiciously easy,” Maisie whispered. 

“Well-roundedness is a joke,” Ellen sighed. “The humanities are fake.”

The final scores were tied. “Congratulations! You have both done very well,” said the voice. “And now, for the final, tiebreaking question.”

A drumroll vibrated through the arena, though where it was coming from was unclear.

“When baking cookies, adding too much of this substance makes cookies hard, gritty, and darker in color.”

Ellen hit her buzzer. “What is sugar?”

“Correct. Congratulations, Ellen.”

“Yay!” Ellen clapped a little, then rolled her eyes a little self-consciously and looked back to the floor. “Anyway. Now what?”

“Now, we depart,” the voice said. The pillar of light vanished, and the walls of the arena began to drop away. Instead of being carried away by a windstorm, though, Maisie just felt herself squeezed into nothingness from all sides, and then expanded again on her front doorstep. Her backpack was on the ground where she’d left it, and her mother was watching TV, oblivious to anything out of the ordinary with her daughter.

She looked at her watch. No time had passed. Her phone vibrated in her pocket. It was a text from Ellen. “Library? :D”

“K,” Maisie typed back. 

When they’d both settled into their usual study spot-- a table by a window, in the back, on the first floor-- Maisie let herself ask the question that had been nagging her since the trial. “How did you know that thing about the cookies?”

Ellen beamed. “I love to bake! It’s like chemistry. Measuring things and experimenting with what works best and tastes best.” She looked away. “I could teach you, maybe, if you want,” she said, her voice hesitant and quiet.

Maisie looked at the clock. “Sure, but we have to finish the bio lab first.”

Ellen brightened. “Okay!”

“You know, we always meet at your house or the library, but not at my house,” Ellen said, when they were on their way back.

“Won’t your parents be weird about it, because they know all about me? They might not even let me in.” Maisie kicked a rock and tried to imagine meeting Ellen’s parents. It would be uncomfortable, she decided.

Ellen tilted her head sideways and grinned, in an expression Maisie had learned to recognize as “Ellen getting away with something.” 

“Well,” she said, still smiling, “When I called, I said a friend from class was coming over to bake cookies. I never said which friend, and I never mentioned your name. And they don’t know what Maisie Wong looks like. So. It’s not lying! Technically.”

“Are you even allowed to lie, with the Contract thing and all?”

Ellen smiled again, skipping ahead and then turning around to walk backwards while facing Maisie, like a college tour guide. “Not directly. If I say something that I know isn’t true, I break the contract. Lies of omission are harder to detect since it’s so easy to accidentally forget to say something, right? They’re frowned upon, definitely, but I feel like this is a special circumstance.”

Maisie looked at her carefully. “You’re not as innocent as you pretend to be.”

Ellen giggled, still walking backwards. She whirled around. “Oh look, we’re here!”

Her house looked absolutely identical to Maisie’s from the outside, but with the additions of a vase of chrysanthemums on the doorstep and a cheery welcome mat. Ellen opened the unlocked door and yelled, “Mother!” There was no response.

“She’s probably out walking the dog. His name’s Spencer, he’s a big golden retriever and I love him,” Ellen explained. “The kitchen’s this way.”

Ellen unfolded a little stepladder next to the stove and jumped on it to get bowls from the upper cabinets. “Ellen, I’m tall, just tell me what you need from up there while you go get more height-appropriate stuff.”

“You’re not that tall and I already got everything we need so shush.” She tapped Maisie’s shoulder playfully and jumped off the stepladder, carefully putting bowls and dry ingredients on the counter in a practiced motion. Ellen skipped over to the fridge.

“I can’t just stand here,” Maisie protested.

“You’re a guest and you don’t know where anything is. If you can’t stand, sit down.” Ellen pulled out milk, eggs, and butter, and arranged them on the counter.

Maisie sat. This was a new side of Ellen, she thought, and it was nice to see.

“I should teach you how to make traditional southern biscuits, but you asked about cookies so we’re getting cookies. You’re not allergic to anything, are you?”

Maisie shook her head.

“Okay, great.” Ellen slammed a bag of chocolate chips down on the counter and motioned her over.

“We’re using melted butter for denser, more flavorful cookies. Creamed butter makes them more cakey, which some people like but I don’t and this is my recipe so that’s what we’re getting.”

Ellen put the butter in the microwave, then took two eggs out of the cartoon and started cracking them. “I’ve experimented with a few different egg ratios. The yolk to white ratio affects the texture of the cookies. Two whites and one yolk is my personal favorite.” 

She measured a spoonful of baking powder. “I like baking powder over baking soda. Also, you need both brown sugar and white sugar. White sugar makes the cookies spread out more, but brown sugar tastes better in cookies.”

“There’s a lot of debate over whether bread flour or cake flour is better in cookies, but I just use all-purpose flour and it’s fine. You need a little bit more flour than butter, but not too much. 10 to 8 ratio.” She gave Maisie a measuring cup. “I give you the privilege of measuring 10 ounces of flour.”

“Okay.” Maisie measured the ten ounces of flour. “I can see how this is like chemistry now.”

“Right? I think this is where my enjoyment of science started.”

Ellen talked and explained without stopping, but Maisie noticed her hands doing things she didn’t bother to bring up, like adding a pinch of vanilla extract here, a dash of salt there, a flick of a spoon to get the texture just right. The kind of things you learn through years of practice and sheer instinct, not by reading recipe blogs and watching the Food Network.

“Technically, these will taste way better if we let the dough rest overnight, but we don’t have the patience for that, do we?”

Maisie checked her watch again. “I don’t have to be home for another hour, and these take like 20 minutes to bake, right? We could let them rest for half an hour and then bake them.”

“That works!” Ellen wrapped the bowl in plastic wrap, then froze. The door clicked.  She shoved the bowl at Maisie. “Here, put this on the middle shelf in the fridge, I’ll be right back!”

Maisie did so, hearing Ellen shout “Mom! Spencer! How are y’all!” from the entryway.  _ Is she trying to warn me or something? _

“We’re going upstairs to do homework now bye!” Ellen yelled, grabbing Maisie by the shoulders and steering her to the staircase.

“What, you’re not even going to introduce us?” Ellen’s mother looked a lot like her, small, round, and blonde, in jeans and a plum-colored sweater. She was smiling pleasantly, but there was a glint of steel in her twinkly blue eyes.

Ellen looked back and forth between them with a panicked expression.

“I’m Emma,” Maisie said. “I’m in Ellen’s class. We’re working on a project together.” Emma Yu was a classmate at an educational summercamp Maisie had attended a few years ago, and also the first name she could think of.

“Yup. Mother, can you put the cookie dough in the oven in half an hour, please?”

“Well, since you asked so nicely, I suppose I will. Nice to meet you... Emma.”

“Nice to meet you too, Mrs. Pearson!” The two girls ran upstairs.

Ellen took Maisie to a room at the end of the hall, with a little chalkboard on the door that said Ellen in big curly letters. “I finally finished unpacking last week,” Ellen explained. “Welcome to my room, I guess!”

The floor was carpeted in blue, and everything was neat and clean and color-coordinated. The wall above her bed was covered in photos of Ellen, of her friends, of Spencer the dog. 

“Do you miss your friends from Georgia?” Maisie asked, sitting down on the carpet and pulling her knees close to her chest.

Ellen sat down, too. “A little, but we talk a lot still, over videochats and messaging and stuff. They keep me updated on what’s happening down there.”

“It seems like you were pretty popular,” Maisie observed, looking at the photos again.

Ellen laughed a little and shook her head. “The people I like tend to like me too, but I didn’t like that many people at my school. So I was happy, but not universally popular, y’know? Do you want to practice Write It Do It again?”  
Maisie checked her backpack. “Yeah, I brought the stuff for it, so why not.”

They were getting better at Write it, Do it.  As Maisie expected, she was a “doer” and Ellen a “writer.” They’d come up with shorthand to indicate what pieces faced which directions, and agreed to estimate relative distances the same way. Now, Maisie took out a white cardboard box and gave it to Ellen, and set a timer for twenty five minutes.

“And...go!”  
Maisie turned around and took out her book for English class while Ellen wrote. No point spending twenty five minutes doing nothing. 

When the timer beeped, Ellen passed her the written instructions and said, “I’m going to go make sure mother put the cookies in. Do your thing.”

Maisie did her thing. The k’nex structure she came up with ended up looking very similar to the original, with just a few pieces slightly off, but it took her the full time limit. When Ellen came back upstairs, saying “The cookies are done! They’re cooling now,” Maisie showed her the structure she’d built.

“We’re getting good at this!” Ellen said.

Maisie smiled. “We are. We should start practicing with harder models, and tricks where they put extra pieces in the doer’s set to confuse them.”

“That sounds annoying, but yeah! Definitely. Let’s go eat cookies.”

Maisie looked at Ellen’s bright, happy face, and then looked at her watch. “I gotta go home soon, sorry. Do you think I could just take some cookies home with me?”

Ellen looked disappointed, but nodded. “Yeah. Yeah of course. Hey, Maisie-”

“Yeah?” She started down the stairs.

“No hard feelings about the competition thing, right?’

“No hard feelings,” Maisie repeated. “I’d actually almost forgotten about that whole thing until you brought it up.” 

Ellen’s eyes went even bigger than they usually were, and her lips scrunched together in a picture of worry. “I’m sorry!”

“It’s fine,” Maisie said automatically, but Ellen’s face still didn’t change. 

They went into the kitchen where the cookies sat cooling on a baking sheet, still steaming and filling the house with a heavenly scent. 

Ellen pulled a plastic bag out of a drawer and filled it with half of the cookies. “Here. Sorry about that whole thing again. I’ll see you on Monday?”

“Yeah,” Maisie said, taking the bag, “see you on Monday.”

 

The next morning at precisely 11 o’clock, Maisie’s mother dropped her off at The Pancake Place in the Pineborough Shopping Center. She saw Leihai on her way in and waved her over

They embraced. “Hey! How was your game yesterday?”

Leihai shrugged dismissively. “Oh, we lost, but it was close and I personally did good so whatever. How’ve you been?” 

_ I lost the first round in a supernatural competition with the new girl because she knew more about baking cookies than I did.  _ “Well enough. AP Chem’s a struggle.” They took a seat at a table by the window and a server came by with menus. The Pancake Place was incongruously decorated like an English pub, all dark wood paneling and dim lighting, but the pancakes were state of the art.

Leihai gave her a long, measured look. “AP Chem, huh? How’s working with the new girl?”

“Ellen? It’s fine. We’re partners for this science club event and that’s really annoying, because we need to practice together all the time.”

“Are you ready to order?” said the server, beaming at them both. 

“Yeah, I’ll have half an order of banana pecan pancakes and she’ll get the strawberry french toast.” said Leihai, “and two Sprites.”

“You know my order?” 

“Maisie, strawberry french toast is your favorite food, that you always order every time we come here.”

Maisie shrugged, smiling. “I know what I like.”

“That you do.”

“You have Wilson for American History right? Did he tell you about...” Leihai launched into an anecdote about something that happened in her American History class, and Maisie nodded and “mhmm”-ed along, still thinking about the stupid contest.

Leihai trailed off, and gave Maisie a look again. “Something’s bothering you, I can tell. Is it really just AP Chem? Is it SciClub drama?”

Their food arrived, and Maisie tucked in eagerly to avoid answering. Leihai kept looking at her, though, slowly transitioning from a Look into a Glare. Maisie put her fork down and swallowed.

“Not really...well sort of... I just have a lot of things to do and it’s overwhelming me. How about you, though? You’re at frisbee practice every single day after school.” 

“Yeah, but my classes aren’t super demanding this year and I don’t really do anything else besides frisbee anymore. I might join model UN though, their first mock is coming up. Or get a job at that Asian restaurant near our school.”

“Model UN is for exclusively terrible people.”

“But Maisie.” Leihai leaned across the table and grabbed Maisie’s arms. “COLLEGE APPS.”

“You right.” They laughed, but it felt shaky, not as easy as it used to be.

“Is it a secret internet boyfriend?” Leihai asked. “The thing you’re not telling me about.”  
Maisie choked on her strawberry french toast. “Don’t say things like that while I am EATING FOOD! No! God no!”  
“There’s the Maisie I know and love,” Leihai said, grinning. “When you’re lying you sound so tired and bland. Like a ghost. That’s how I knew you weren’t telling me what was bothering you.”

“Nothing’s bothering me, god, I’m just a standard Pineborough-brand overachieving nerd trying not to crumble under the pressure.” Maisie sipped her Sprite, scowling.

“Okay, okay.”

They ate and chatted, and Maisie felt the pressure of a secret settle and wrap itself around her and Leihai, and wondered if she could tell her friend what was really going on. If Leihai would even believe her about it.

The weeks ticked by, day by day. Maisie ate lunch with her friends, and Ellen ate lunch with kids from her choir class. They talked amicably in classes, and worked together outside of class, but there was a distance between them neither knew how to resolve, or if they even should.

Maisie went trick-or-treating in Joshika’s neighborhood for Halloween, because years of careful research have proven that neighborhood had the best and most candy in the area. She dressed as a witch, as she always did. She came home around 9, because Halloween was on a Wednesday that year and she still had homework due the next day. When she walked through the door, kicking off her shoes and shaking glitter out of her hair, her mom shouted from the living room: “Your friend Ellen asked about you!”

“We’re not friends, we’re just working together,” Maisie yelled back, stomping her way upstairs.  _ And studying together, and baking together, and shopping for new materials to practice Write it Do it with together...I spend more time alone with Ellen than I have with any of my friends since elementary school. Yikes. _ “Actually, we might be friends,” Maisie shouted, from the staircase. Her mother laughed.

The first weekend of November, New Jersey students get a long weekend because their teachers have a convention. Clubs take advantage of this by holding extra meetings and extra practices, for instance, Science Club. At noon on Friday, approximately half of the Science Club gathered at Sal’s house to practice for the upcoming regional competition. Some events required building things, some were written paper tests, but after all the events have been completed and graded, there’s a quiz bowl section of the competition that five team members compete in while the rest get to watch and cheer from the sidelines.

Of course, the easiest way to practice for both the written tests and the quiz bowl tests is to hook up a laptop to the TV and play Science Club jeopardy for two hours. With snacks.  
“We only have like, three buzzer things, so everyone just stomp your foot when you want to answer. Maisie, as secretary it is your solemn duty to write down everyone’s scores on this totally for-fun practice round,” Sal was saying as he pulled up the jeopardy game. Steve showed up and plopped down on the couch next to Maisie, Ellen on the other side of her, attempting to shrink into the space. 

“But I want to play too! I’ve been practicing!”  _ With my friend and mentor figure, Astaroth, Grand Duke of Hell,  _ Maisie didn’t add.

“You can still play, just record the scores too.” Sal passed her a clipboard, and she sighed.

“Teams or individual?” she asked.

“Individuals, of course. Actually wait no, two teams for question-choosing purposes, but you keep track of how many things everyone gets right so I can see how well we’re all doing.”

“That’s confusing, but okay.”

Sal closed his eyes and spun around the room with one finger extended and then stopped, pointing at Rish. “Pick a category!” Sal demanded.

Rish took a handful of potato chips and chewed, slowly, totally failing to be excited and motivated by this funducational experience. “Biology for 500,” he said, deadpan.

Sal clicked it, and the slide loaded. 

“Oh my god,” Maisie, who was a fast reader, said first. Ellen laughed.

In white text on blue background, the powerpoint proclaimed, “This organelle is often referred to as “the powerhouse of the cell.”

“This organelle is often referred to as- I SWEAR TO GOD DOMINIQUE I TOLD YOU NO MEMES IN OUR STUDY PARTY POWERPOINTS.”

Tim Yang, in between fits of laughter, sputtered out, “She’s at a college interview today, which is probably why she put that in there.”

Sal put his hand to his forehead and sighed dramatically. “We all agree the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, yes? Okay, I’m throwing this question out. Moving the fuck on.”

As the game progressed and Maisie noted down everyone’s scores, including what categories people did better and worse on, a clear pattern began to emerge. First, people did better in their areas of focus, and the kids on the quiz bowl team did better than the kids who weren’t, which was expected. But what she didn’t really expect was that she and Ellen had gotten almost every question right, except some of the harder physics questions. The final tally had Steve in first, with Maisie and Ellen not far behind. Sal had abstained in favor of reading the powerpoint slides out loud in dramatic voices. Slacker.

Sal noticed, too. “You two are surprisingly good at this. I’m making you both alternates for the quiz competition. You’ll have to come to our Friday practices from now on but don’t worry too much, you’ll probably not end up getting subbed in.”

Ellen held up her hand for a high-five, and Maisie delivered. “Nice.” 

Their first competition was in the middle of a school week in November. Maisie and Ellen had to reschedule an in-class American History essay and a math test, get a permission slip signed to miss a day of school, then hop on the school bus at the bright and early hour of six in the morning. 

Bright would definitely be overstating it, Maisie reflected. It was still dark outside. And freezing cold. Even though Maisie had packed a blanket in her backpack, she was still shivering when she got on the bus and slid into her favorite spot, on the left, near the front, next to the window. Not one to waste time, Maisie pulled out her English homework and a penlight and started working on the assignment due the next day.

“Can I sit here?” 

Maisie looked up. Ellen, in earmuffs  _ and  _ a hat, and matching gloves, dark green Pineborough Science Club t-shirt peeking out from under her jacket, was standing expectantly in the aisle.

“Sure.” Maisie said. Ellen sat down. Maisie adjusted her blanket so it covered both of them.

“You don’t have to do that,” Ellen began.

Maisie glared at her. “Shut up and let me be nice.” Ellen chuckled softly, and Maisie could feel heat rising in her face in spite of herself.

“So how long is this bus ride?” Ellen asked. 

“Well, the competition’s in Marlton, but there’s construction going on the usual route so we’re taking a weird roundabout path and we’ll be there in about an hour, hour and a half. Welcome to New Jersey High School Competitions, where every school you compete with is either about an hour away, or twenty minutes away, no in between. At least that’s what my friend Sophie says, and she’s a manager of the fencing team so she should know.” Maisie pulled out her phone to check the time. “We’ll be there by 8 at the latest.”

“That’s so early.”

Maisie nodded. “Anyway, Lessick’s homework assignment isn’t going to do itself, so if you don’t mind...” she flicked the penlight on again, and went back to highlighting and annotating the printed out essay.

Ellen smiled gently, and pulled out her own book.

“What’re you reading?” Maisie asked immediately.

“I thought you had homework,” Ellen replied.

“Whatever.” Maisie flushed. “I was just curious.”

Ellen laughed. “It’s  _ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter _ , by Carson McCullers? It’s really good. It’s my independent reading book for English.”

“Oh, cool. I’ve never read it, but cool title.” Maisie went back to her homework. She had no opinions on Carson McCullers.

“What’s your independent reading book?” Ellen asked.

Maisie hummed and highlighted, not answering her question.

“You haven’t picked one yet? The essay’s next week!”

“I read fast,” Maisie protested, “and I’ve been focused on studying for Astronomy and practicing for Write it Do it with you. I haven’t had time to look for books.”

“Lessick gave us a list to pick from, you didn’t even have to look for anything.”

“Well, I couldn’t decide! Maybe I’ll read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter too. Although it looks kind of long,” she added looking at Ellen’s book.

“It’s not actually that long, this edition’s just formatted nicely. I think the Martian Chronicles is the shortest book on the list, but it’s weird. Old fashioned sci-fi from before computers were invented.” Ellen paused. “I’ve actually read most of the books on the list before. I read a lot. Haven’t had much time to lately though.”

“I like sci-fi, I guess. I don’t read that much anymore. I used to read a lot as a kid but then school happened.” Maisie felt Ellen’s pitying eyes on her, and forced herself to look away. She looked out the window instead. A wise choice, as it turned out. The endless cement highway glowed orange in the rising sun, and the sky was pink and purple. It was almost as if this dinky, poorly-heated school bus was taking them to another planet, another universe, instead of an equally small town in the same state as the small town they just left.

“That’s beautiful,” Ellen breathed, leaning close to Maisie to look out the window. Maisie could feel heat rise to her face, again, and pushed Ellen off her. Maisie scrunched closer to the window and pulled her blanket tightly around her. “I really should finish this homework,” she muttered, still staring fixedly at the floor.

Ellen looked at her, then shifted away, moving closer to the aisle. “And I have a book to read,” she said, sounding confused and maybe even a little betrayed.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, each doing her own thing, letting the sounds of their snoring, studying, and gossiping quietly wash over them.

Maisie finally broke the silence first. “I’m sorry, I just don’t like people being super close to me physically. I overreacted.”

“It’s fine,” Ellen said, her voice full of sympathy and understanding, and Maisie relaxed. She finished her homework assignment with a slight smile on her face. Then went back to reviewing astronomy notes.

The bus pulled into the parking lot of Marlton High School, and the Science Club filed out, tired and achy. Most of the boys were in sweatpants and their club t-shirts. Ellen had paired her t-shirt with a cream-colored pleated skirt and dark green tights, perfectly coordinated as usual. Maisie wore jeans, as always. They followed the hoardes of students from other schools to the cafeteria, where slightly bruised fruits, juice boxes and bagels were being served.

Dr. Louis arrived, holding an orange envelope filled with papers to hand off to the officers. “Name tags, maps, and information packets for everyone,” she passed those to Maisie for distributing to the masses, “a schedule,” she passed that to Steve, “application form for that grant we need,” to Dominique, and to Sal: “You have to fill out the roster for the quiz bowl team again, since we decided to add the girls as alternates.”

“Okay. Maisie Wong with an O, right? And Ellen Peterson?” Sal asked, writing.

“Pearson, P-e-a-r-s-o-n,” Ellen spelled. Sal scribbled obligingly. 

“Rad. Okay, after Write it Do it, meet back here no later than 2:15.” The girls nodded.

“Maze!” Maisie turned around. An asian girl with short, bleached hair and a South Wintergreen High shirt was waving at her. 

“Cass!” They embraced. “I haven’t seen you since last year’s States, oh my god!” Maisie exclaimed.

“Too long, babe, too long,” Cass declared. “What’re your events this year?”

“Astro and Write it Do it with Ellen. This is Ellen, by the way. She moved here from Georgia. Ellen, this is Cassie Luo, an old friend from summer camp ages ago.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m doing Astro, too! That class we took is actually what got me interested in space at all. Remember the trip to the planetarium?”

Maisie smiled, thinking back to the summer before seventh grade, and how simple and interesting everything seemed then. “Yeah. That was fun.”

“We have to take a selfie together,” Cassie said, grabbing Maisie’s arm and pulling her in for the photo. “Smile, nerd!”

“Aah! Okay!” Maisie was laughing, and Cassie snapped the photo. They looked unusually happy to be at a Science Competition at 7:30 in the morning.

“Do you still talk to anyone from camp?” Cassie said then. “I message Louisa sometimes, but it’s mostly just a facebook comments kind of friendship, you know?”

The laughter faded.

“Yeah,” Maisie said quietly. “I know.”

“Anyway, I gotta go back to my team, but I’ll see you at the test! Nice to meet you, Ellen,” Cassie jerked her head at her briefly, and walked away.

“She seems nice,” Ellen murmured. 

“She’s great. I only see her at these competitions, though. I’m gonna go get a bagel, do you want anything?”

Ellen shook her head. “I’ll just review my invasive species notes until it’s time,” she said. 

Maisie started to walk towards the bagel bar, when she felt something pull her away and towards the bathroom.  _ Ah. Astaroth wants to talk to me.  _ The demons generally respected her autonomy and didn’t try to posess her without asking most of the time, but out of all the ones she spoke to, Astaroth was most prone to hijacking her muscles for some reason or other.

Maisie locked herself in a stall and tugged on her pendant. “Was that really necessary, dude?” she hissed.

“You need a pep talk!” the grumbly voice answered. “Stolas, don’t you agree she needs a pep talk?” Stolas’s gentler presence joined Astaroth’s in her head, and if Maisie wasn’t used to it she would be developing a migraine.

“I do not! I’m fine! I’m ready! I aced this last year and I’ll ace it again this year. Get out of my head and let me go get that bagel I deserve.”

“You didn’t ace it, dear,” Stolas pointed out, gently. “You got bronze, which is excellent, but the stakes are rather higher this time around.”

Maisie looked at the ceiling. “Right. Yes. The Competition,” she bit out the capital letters.

She exhaled through her nose. “Please believe me when I say I am prepared, both because you helped me prepare and because I worked hard on my own. Also believe me when I say I don’t have test anxiety. I’ve never had test anxiety for as long as you’ve known me. All the other kinds of anxiety we can argue about but I am not freaking out right now. Even if I was, I know how to calm myself down, and step one is getting you guys out of my head so I can actually think clearly! I’ve got this.”

Though the pressures on her brain were still there, they were silent. After a moment, Stolas said, “define stellar evolution.”

“The process by which a star changes in its lifetime.”

“Go get ‘em, kid,” said Astaroth, and Maisie could hear his terrible smile in his voice. The pressure on her head lifted suddenly, making her feel like she’d stuck her head in a tank of cold water.  _ Breathe in, breathe out, count to ten. Go get a bagel. _

And Maisie did.

When she came back, Ellen looked slightly shaken and annoyed. “Did...you know...talk to you?” she asked.

“How’d you guess?” Maisie asked.

Ellen lowered her voice, even though no one was listening. “Barachiel pulled me out of time to give me some ‘friendly advice,’ bless his heart. I figured your guy would do the same.” 

“Pulled you out of time?”

Ellen shrugged, embarrassed. “He can only do it for a few minutes at once, but it’s really useful when you need to have a quick conversation without anyone else hearing or wasting time.” 

“Damn. All my demon dudes can do is hijack my brain and body whenever they please. I have to trust them to not do it when I don’t want it to happen. So that’s fun.”

“What’re you guys talking about? Ellen, are you nervous about your first competition?” Dominique sat down next to them, taking her position as the Senior Girl on the team extremely seriously.

Ellen blushed. “Ah, I’m sure I’ve studied enough. And we definitely practiced hard for write it, do it, so uh. We’ll do our best.” She pumped a fist half-heartedly.

Dominique put a hand on her shoulder encouragingly. “You got this. You too, Maze. And if any of the boys from any team make you feel weird and gross for some reason tell me and I’ll yell at him for you.”

“Dominique, you are a benevolent force of nature,” Maisie whispered in awe. 

Dominique flashed a smile. “I try.”

The organizer’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers then, welcoming students to the event and imploring everyone to go to their assigned classrooms for written tests now. 

Maisie pulled out her map, where she’d carefully highlighted all the rooms she needed to know today. “I’m in 107,” she said. “Anyone else in 107, or thereabouts?”

Ellen frowned at her own paper. “I’m in 163.”

“I’m in 105, I’ll walk with you,” Steve offered. 

“Great. Let’s go.” 

“Nervous?” Steve said as they made their way down the unfamiliar hallways.

“Why does everyone keep asking me that? I’m FINE!” Maisie definitely didn’t scream.

“Whoa, chill. I believe you. I’m fine too, for the record.” Steve was smiling slightly, and for some reason that irritated Maisie more.

“Didn’t you get gold for physics last year?” 

“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for me now. I still had to study and review stuff. Anyway, here’s my room. See you later, Maisie.” Steve slipped into his classroom. And a few steps later, Maisie found hers.

She waved to Cassie and found her assigned seat, and soon enough, the test began.

“How do you think you did?” Cassie asked, when they were both leaving for lunch after the test.

Maisie shrugged. “Good enough?” she said. “It wasn’t like, super hard. I was pretty sure of most of my answers.”

“Pretty sure of most,” Cassie repeated. “Yeah basically.”

They both laughed and got their lunches, then split up to eat with their schools.

“How was invasive species?” Maisie asked.

Ellen had an expression on her face like one who has seen many unknowable horrors. “Invasive,” she whispered.

She shook her head slightly and took a deep breath, controlling her emotions. “I. Strongly dislike this event,” she said, in a carefully controlled voice.

“Are you like, not allowed to say anything worse about it? Because of the Thing?” Maisie asked, opening her juice box.

Ellen nodded. “No swearing and no lying.”

Maisie sipped her juice. “Sucks,” she said simply.

Ellen puffed out a laugh. “Yeah.”

“You ready for Write it Do it?”

“Are you?”

“I asked you first.”

Ellen rolled her eyes, but she was smiling as she did so. “As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”

“We are going to kick ass and take names.”

“Definitely.”

Sal slid onto the plastic bench with them. “How are my favorite sophomore girls?” he said.

“We’re the only sophomore girls on the team,” Ellen pointed out.

“Ergo, my favorite. How were your events?”

“As fabulous as answering scantron questions about stars exploding can possibly be,” Maisie said. He laughed.

“Answers like that are why you are my favorites,” he said.

“How was your thing?”

“Entomology? Fun. Bugs. Yipee. I sent in my Stanford app yesterday and everything else is irrelevant.” Sal went around to the other side of the table to bother the boys instead.

Write it, Do it, was in a small side gym. There were events involving building things and robot races happening in the main gym, but because the structures built in WIDI were fairly small, they could get away with a smaller space. No spectators, of course.

Maisie, as the do-er, was led into a side hallway to wait for twenty-five minutes while Ellen wrote out her instructions. They weren’t allowed to have any books or phones on them, in case of cheating.   
“So, how’s everyone doing?” asked a white boy from another school.

“Better than you!” Someone else called out, to general nervous laughter. They chatted idly as the time ticked away, until finally the door opened and the writers filed out.

Ellen passed her paper to Maisie. They locked eyes. In Ellen’s eyes, Maisie could see a quiet fire burn, and Maisie knew they would not lose. Maybe they wouldn’t come in first, but definitely not last. 

She picked up the instructions and started building.

Maisie finished fast, but missed a few key pieces. Overall, though, they both thought they did fairly well for a first try. 

“I probably should have clarified what direction this blue piece was pointing in,” Ellen muttered, pointing at her instructions.

“Yeah well I shouldn’t have rushed so much. We both messed up, we’ll do better next time, that’s it. Let’s go to quiz bowl,” Maisie said.

Quiz bowl was held in the auditorium. The students not competing filled in at the back of the room, and the competing teams were arranged on the stage, with tables and buzzers. As they were setting up, Maisie noticed that Pineborough’s core quiz team was all male. So were a lot of the other school’s teams. She sighed a little.

“Something wrong?” Ellen asked, glancing over at her. Maisie jumped.

“Nah, don’t worry about it.” Maisie and Ellen sat down next to Dominique in the row closest to the stage. She gave them a reassuring smile.

“When do we find out our scores?”

“After this thing’s done.”

“Hey, Ellen,” Dominique called. “Do you know the Pineborough Pines Cheer?”

Maisie slammed her eyes shut. “Please no. Not today, Satan.”

“It’s tradition!” Dominique protested. “Okay so whenever we get a point, you gotta go like this,” she clapped and tapped her elbows in a sort of demented macarena routine, “and shout GO PINES!”

“Don’t listen to her. We never do that. Every year we tell the newbies it’s a thing we do and for some strange reason they never believe us. Just shout go whoever just scored whenever someone from our team answers something right,” Maisie explained.

Dominique giggled. “Okay, okay. But there’s one more thing you actually do need to know. Who’s our rival school?”

Ellen blinked. “All...sborough?” she guessed.

“Close! Alsdale. They’re the ones in the red and yellow shirts on the left. Their mascot’s the beavers. When they score we shout Dam you to hell.”

“We don’t actually shout that either,” Maisie added. “But we do hate them.”

“My ex-boyfriend went there,” Dominique said. “He cheated on me. Bastard.”

A girl in an Alsdale shirt waved at her. “I do, however, have a lot of friends on that team I stayed friends with after the break-up,” she added a little quieter this time. “But whatever. YOU NERDS ARE GOING DOWN!” she yelled, and the eponymous nerds just laughed.

“You seem happy today,” Maisie observed.

“I’m done with all my early college apps. ED to Princeton, Early action to Stanford and a few safeties,” Dominique rattled off. “I don’t need to write another supplement for a month and life is beautiful.” Dominique was the picture of relief.

“Good luck,” said Ellen.

“Thanks.”

Eventually, the audience quieted down, and the battle of the champions began. Everyone seemed fairly evenly matched,  and when the proctor called half-time, Alsdale and Pineborough were tied for first, with Parsnipville only a few points behind. 

“This isn’t good, it’s too close. Sal’s going to switch you in, probably,” Dominique said. She had a pad of paper on which she’d been tracking who on Pineborough’s team had been getting the most questions right. “Akshay only answered twice and he’s the least experienced.”

Sure enough, Sal was talking to the proctor, and then Akshay got up and walked off the stage. “Congrats, Maisie. You’re in,” he said, not sounding super bitter. “Kick ass.”

“Will do.” They fist-bumped.

Being on the other side of the stage divide felt strange. The lighting wasn’t like in a theater, where the audience was just a sea of black in front of the performers. She could clearly see the Pineborough green shirts clustered together, Ellen and Dominique cheering loudly. They looked, Maisie thought, very small from so far away.

She slid into the plastic chair at the end of the Pineborough table, and took the black buzzer offered her. “It’s really simple,” Sal said, grinning at her.  “Just hit this and answer the questions when you know the answers. Don’t freak out, if you don’t get it, we got it.”

“Thanks, dad,” Maisie replied, smiling as she rolled her eyes.

She looked at her fellow quiz bowl kids. Sal, Steve, Tim, and Tyler Kagan. Tim was half a frisbee kid and Tyler never talked, so she didn’t really know them much. Steve and Sal were looking at her sympathetically, though, and Maisie thought maybe it would be okay after all.

As it turned out, it was more than okay. Actually, it was really easy.

Maisie buzzed in for astronomy questions, and invasive species questions where she’d just absorbed the information from studying Ellen (with Ellen. Studying  _ with  _ Ellen), and a few bio and chem questions she just knew from class. She didn’t always get there first, but when she did, she got it right. By the time the final buzzer blared, she had answered five questions, almost as many as veteran Steve.

They beat Alsdale, 46-40. There was cheering and yelling and screaming, and the Pineborough Science Team rushed the stage like a forest-green flood.

“Stay up here so we can take pictures in front of the scoreboard,” Steve whispered to Maisie. They took pictures in front of the scoreboard, Dominique and Sal snapchatting the photos of them beating Alsdale to their friends at Alsdale.

“So does that mean we won the whole thing?” Ellen asked.

“No, but it’s a pretty good indicator that we’re going on to states. Generally the top 3 teams in quiz bowl are the top 3 overall, but the specific order is down to numbers, which are usually pretty close.

The quiz bowl proctor tapped his mic, and everyone snapped to attention. “Since we’re all gathered here today,” he said, “Now is as good a time as any to announce the winners of each event. Medals and trophies have already been delivered to your coaches.” An assistant handed him a stapled packet. “Ahem. So. Anatomy and Physiology. In fourth place, we have...”

“Maisie, whenever they say Pineborough, write down who won what. Secretary duties,” Sal hissed. She took out a pen and paper obligingly.

Pineborough won a lot.

“Astronomy, in fourth place, Cassandra Luo from South Wintergreen High School. In third place, Andrew Werner from Levinshire Academy for Science. In second place, Maisie Wong from Pineborough High School. In first place-” The announcer was drowned out by the cheering from Pineborough’s team. Maisie’s face heated up as she wrote a little Astro, Silver next to her name on her sheet, smiling slightly. Dominique pushed her, and she made her way up to the stage, accepting her medal and shaking hands with the proctor whose name and reason for existing still eluded her.

Ellen placed second in Invasive Species, too. They high-fived on her way up to the podium. Finally, wrapping up a long, long list, “Write it do it, in fourth place, Ellen Pearson and Maisie Wong from Pineborough High School.”

“Nice! Told you it would all work out,” Sal said, high-fiving them both with an insufferably smug expression.

“Yeah, fine,” Maisie admitted. “It worked out pretty well.”

“Overall awards,” the announcer boomed. The room immediately hushed, everyone waiting to hear which of the top schools would be going on to States, and which would be first.

“In third place, and moving on to States, South Wintergreen High School. In second place, Alsdale High School. In first place....Pineborough High School.”

“YEAH!!”

“SUCK IT ALSDALE!”

“WE ARE NUMBER ONE! WE ARE NUMBER ONE!”

The team exploded in trumphant cheering.

“We got third place last year, and the year before that, so this is kind of a big deal,” Maisie explained to Ellen. “Everyone did better than expected, I guess.”

Ellen smiled. “We did good,” she said. 

Maisie smiled back. “Yeah,” she said. “We did.”

The bus ride back was a lot more energetic than the ride there, everyone riding the high of placing first in the region. Sal organized a game of Heads Up in the back of the bus, and Maisie and Ellen joined in. Eventually, though, the conversation turned towards which girls the upperclassman nerd boys should ask to junior or senior prom, and the two girls present glanced at each other and moved to a new seat in the front of the bus.

“How can they just talk about the girls at school like products you write Amazon reviews about?” Maisie asked. “Like, Angie Yu, pretty but temperamental, 3 stars out of 5. That’s gross. I’m glad my friends don’t really talk to this group of guys ever.”

Ellen was quiet for a moment. “Do you think one of them’s gonna ask you to prom? Or me?”  
Maisie let out a quiet _uuuuuuugh_ noise. “I do not want to think about this. It is November. And we’re sophomores. Too, too early for prom thoughts.”

Ellen laughed. “That’s fair.” She took out her book again, and they both read in silence for the rest of the bus ride.

They returned to Pineborough. Sal jumped up at the front of the bus. “Great job today, everybody! See you all at the meeting next week. We’ll have a mini-awards ceremony where we’ll eat food and pass out the medals for those of you who placed in events, which is actually almost all of you so wow! Do your homework and get some sleep, tonight! I’m super proud of all of you!”

“Thanks, dad!” someone yelled, and everyone laughed.

November was fading into December, and with December came Science Club Secret Santa. They used a program online to fill out preferences and make wishlists, and the program also assigned everyone their giftees, saving Maisie from extra effort and from trying to forget that she knew who everyone’s secret santa was. 

She got Tyler. He was getting an Amazon gift card, Maisie decided immediately, looking at his one-word answers to every single question. She felt kind of bad for the lack of personalization but at least it would definitely be useful. 

At the Science Club meeting that week, everyone was talking more quietly than usual. No one wanted it to be obvious who their secret santa person was, but everyone also wanted to figure out the perfect gift for their person. As with everything in Science Club, Secret Santa was somewhat competitive. 

Dominique had sent out an email to everyone except Sal telling whoever got him as their person was required to buy him a mug that said “#1 Dad” on it, no exceptions.

“Hey, Ellen? You’re friends with Maisie, right?” A tiny freshman whose name Ellen could never remember asked her, a few minutes after the meeting ended, when the officers were all still in the biology room and the regular members were heading out. “Do you know what she’d want for Secret Santa?”

“Well, we’re not really friends,” Ellen said automatically,  “but she’s been talking about that What If? Book for a while, so maybe she’d like that. Or one of those constellation ceiling projector things, because she likes space. I dunno, though.”

“All I want for Christmas is an acceptance letter from Princeton University,” Dominique quipped, back in the bio room as they sorted practice tests.

“You’ll find out in like two weeks, dude. It’ll be fine,” said Sal.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“I am no one’s dad.”

“Hey, Maisie,” Steve asked, adjusting his glasses, “Ellen asked for a scarf on her Secret Santa form, but I don’t know anything about scarves. Can you help me pick one out for her?”

“Ooh, we should all go shopping together for Secret Santa things! Not on Black Friday, though, that’s suicide. How about the day after, since it’s a long weekend? Before the meeting at my house?” Dominique already had her phone out and Google Calendar open.

“So, this Saturday, then? I think I’m free,” Maisie said.  _ Unless another freaking Trial is dropped on me out of nowhere. It’s been long enough.  _

“I’m done with apps so I am definitely free,” said Sal.

“Sure,” said Steve, though he looked a bit disappointed for some strange reason.

“Meet at the Barnes and Noble in Pinebridge Mall at 10?” 

“That works. By the information desk?”

“Yeah.”

So it was decided, and so it happened. “So I was just gonna get Tyler a gift card, but now I feel bad,” Maisie said, as they wandered over to the Science Fiction section. “Do any of you like, actually talk to him? Does he...enjoy things, for fun?”

They stared at her for a moment, then cracked up. “Enjoy things for fun,” Sal managed. “Brutal. But actually, they sell Marvel stuff here, and everyone likes Iron Man, right?”

Dominque and Steve shrugged. “What did his form thing say?” Dominique asked.

“UNIQUELY UNHELPFUL THINGS. Favorite color: red. Favorite candy: snickers. Please do not get me: clothes. Favorite genre of books: lol. He literally just wrote l-o-l for the last one, he’s probably one of those people who never reads for fun, which, okay, is most of us, but at least I can admit I don’t have time to read anymore even though I would like to!” Maisie picked up a book off the rack and flipped through it as if to demonstrate her point.

“Did he answer the fandoms question? That might help.”

“M-C-U, Pokemon, D-W (that could be Doctor Who or Discworld, according to google, but probably Doctor Who), Naruto and One Piece (in this day and age? really?) and that’s it. But at least he wrote more than one word for this answer.”

“Well, there you go!” Sal put a hand on Maisie’s shoulder and steered her to the Marvel merch. “MCU means the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like I said, everyone likes Iron Man.”

“That works. Thanks, guys. What about you, though, what do you still need to buy?”

Sal grinned. “Books. And look, I found them.” He showed her two volumes of some manga she’d never heard of. “And I got a book for myself as a reward for when I send in all my apps.”

“Dominique, Steve, are you guys done here?” Maisie yelled, and they came over.

Dominique held up two adult coloring books and a set of colored pens. “Sure none of you need a destressing coloring book? I need one. I’m going to finish it in two weeks waiting for Princeton’s decision. I’m getting one for my Secret Santa too.”

Maisie took a closer look at the covers. One of them was full of elaborately decorated, beautifully cursive swear words. “Incredible,” she said, with no expression. Dominique laughed.

Steve didn’t have anything. “She asked for a scarf, so I’m getting a scarf. And I don’t see any scarves here. So.”

“Reasonable. To H and M, then? It’s right next door,” Dominique suggested. “And I got paid for tutoring last week and need to get myself a new sweater.”

Steve and Sal exchanged a look. A “boys whose mother buys all their clothes being forced to enter a fashionable clothing store” look. 

“Buying one scarf won’t kill you or destroy your fragile masculinity,” Dominique said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s go.”

They walked in and Dominique pointed to the register. “Scarves are there. Ellen wears a lot of light blue and white, and not a lot of patterns, so look for something like that. Maisie, come try this on.” She shook a thin, loose, knee-length maroon red dress at her. Steve went to go get his scarf thing, and Maisie protested.

“I don’t really buy clothes normally,” she said. 

“I didn’t say to buy it, did I? Just go try it on.”

Since it was the Saturday after Black Friday, the store wasn’t as busy as it usually was, so Maisie was in and out of the changing room fairly quickly. The dress was comfortable, from a stretchy cotton fabric, and it was cheap. And it had pockets. It was, basically, the perfect casual dress. Except Maisie hadn’t worn a casual dress since perhaps the age of eight.

She twirled. Sal and Dominique applauded. “Buy it, Maze, you look great!” Dominique turned to Sal. “Can you go check on Steve?”

When he left, she grinned at Maisie. “I think Steve  _ likes  _ you,” she said.

“What? That’s dumb. You’re dumb. No you’re not dumb I’m sorry I just don’t want that to be true.” She turned her back to the mirror and slid down against it, still wearing the dress. Her face felt hot and uncomfortable and she wanted to run, far, far away. She went back into the changing room and got back into her regular jeans and sweater.

“You don’t like him?”

“We’re friends! But...I don’t want to  _ date  _ him or anything. It’s just...no.” 

Dominique looked at her sideways. “Well, alright. I don’t think he’ll actually make any sort of move, he’s way too awkward for that, so don’t worry. Are you going to buy the dress?”

Maisie checked the price tag again. “Sure, why not?” They went to the register, where the other two Science Club Officers were waiting for them.

“Hey guys. Maisie, what do you think about this scarf?” Steve held up a knitted sky-blue infinity scarf loop.

“It’s perfect,” Maisie said, and she saw how he lit up at the praise and felt a tiny part of her shrivel inside.  _ I’m sorry,  _ she wanted to say.  _ I’m sorry I don’t like you that way.  _

“Maisie, Steven, do either of you need a ride?” asked Sal. “I got my full license a few weeks ago so I can drop both of you off.”

“Oh wait yeah we’re all going to the same place aren’t we? The science club meeting at Dominique’s,” Maisie remembered. With all the shopping thoughts of actual science club had somehow fell out of her head, and she felt slightly embarrassed at how much of a  _ teenage girl  _ she was being. Right now, her most pressing thought was that she didn’t super want to be in the same car as Steve who had a crush on her.

“Maisie’s riding with me so I don’t feel lonely,” Dominique said, winking at Maisie. Maisie felt immensely grateful. “See you boys in a few.” They waved at each other and went to their respective cars.

“We’re not going to be late to our own meeting, are we?” Maisie asked as they walked through the parking lot. 

“Nah, it’s in half an hour. Plenty of time. And I did set everything up before I left, so.”

Dominique was a good driver who followed all the rules and didn’t give her passengers heart attacks. Sal drove like Route 1 was a racetrack and it was truly a miracle he hadn’t gotten any tickets yet. Riding with him always made Maisie carefully reevaluate all her life choices that had led her to that moment. Dominique, fortunately, was not like that.

Maisie was quiet as Dominique drove.  _ Why don’t I like Steve?  _ She thought. He was nice enough. He was smart, which was important to her. And he liked her, which she’d read somewhere was the most important factor in attraction. Why didn’t she like him, then? Had she ever really liked anyone before? What was the problem? 

“Why don’t I like him?” she whispered.

“Who knows, man. Feelings are weird and uncontrollable. Don’t worry about it, though. He won’t do anything beyond asking you to prom, I can guarantee it.”

Maisie smiled weakly. “Maybe he’s just not cute enough for me. Maybe I secretly have really high standards.”

“Maybe. I didn’t think my boyfriend was cute until we had to work on a partner topic in Science Club two years ago, and then he asked me to his junior prom, and now that he’s at Princeton and I’m taking Princeton classes we still see each other pretty often and spend time together.” She smiled softly. “I invited him to the meeting today, by the way. It’s a surprise, but he and Sal are bros so Sal’s gonna flip.”

Dominique’s boyfriend Alex Schoenberg was the former president of Science Club, and current math major at Princeton. Maisie didn’t know him very well, because he was a senior when she was a freshman, but she knew some of the upperclassmen in the club were pretty close with him.

They pulled into the driveway at the same time as Sal and Steve. “Since you’re all technically twenty minutes early, you can help set up,” Dominique said. She threw a bag of chips at Sal. “Go put these in a bowl.”

As Dominique directed the movements of the other three Science Club officers, Maisie couldn’t help but wonder. “Hey, Dom, why aren’t you the Vice President of this nerd club?”

“Hey!” Steve protested, but he was laughing as he did so.

“Because I was friends with the previous treasurer and the previous Vice President was friends with Steve, and we don’t do elections here. Democracy is a sham. Besides, it only matters for college apps, really, since we all just kind of do what we have to do to keep this club from falling apart, right?”  
“Right!” Maisie nodded.

“Hey dude, whose computer do you want to use for the powerpoints today?” Sal asked, plugging the HDMI cable into the TV.

“Don’t care. Use yours.”

“Sweet.”

They set up snacks and drinks and waited for the doorbell to start ringing. “I told Alex to come by after the meeting’s already started, for maximum surprise,” Dominique whispered to Maisie. “It’s gonna be great.”

Ellen showed up at exactly 12:30, bearing a box of cupcakes. “I stress-bake,” she explained, and sat down next to Maisie. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi.” Maisie took a cupcake. It was chocolate with a raspberry jam filling, and lemon frosting. “Wow,” Maisie said. “This is an amazing cupcake.”

“It’s just my favorite kind to make, you know,” Ellen replied, smiling and blushing and looking off to the side. She turned back to Maisie, changing the subject. “Did you get your secret santa gift yet?”   
“Yeah, we all went shopping together before the meeting. Officer bonding time.”

“Sounds like fun! I just ordered my gift online.”

The rest of the club filed in slowly, chatting mildly, and Sal had already loaded the powerpoint when the doorbell rang again.

“I’ll get it!” Dominique said, running out of the room.

“How’s everyone’s long weekend been so far?” Sal asked. The club members responded with generally positive noise. “Great! And now- OH MY GOD ALEX!”

Sal leaped over the coffee table, knocking over the stack of paper plates, and enveloped Dominique’s boyfriend in a bear hug. “BRO!”

“Bro,” Alex replied, in a genuinely heartfelt voice. “Sup, nerds,” he shouted to the stunned group still sitting around the coffee table.

“How is college? How’s Princeton? How are YOU?”

Alex laughed, slightly uncomfortable, and edged his way into the living room, leaning against a corner wall out of the way. The freshmen and sophomores who didn’t know him were observing curiously, while the upperclassmen were snickering. “Dominique convinced me this would be fun. I didn’t mean to hijack your meeting...”

“Shh, it’s not like we’re doing anything too important right now. We just won regionals like two weeks ago. You can give us cool alumni tips,” Sal said, sitting down on the arm of the couch. “And today’s powerpoint is a review of basic physics stuff which you could totally lecture about instead of me.”

Alex laughed. “I’m at that stage where I can do complicated physics stuff fairly easily but do not remember how to draw a force diagram. Especially not at a level where freshmen and sophomores could understand.”

Steve stood up then. “I can do the lecture, you guys can talk, just don’t be too loud.”

“Steve, you are a god among men,” Sal declared. “But actually though when you’re done with the powerpoint I’m making him tell us all about college life,” he added.

As promised, at the end of the meeting Alex sat down in a chair in front of the TV and answered questions from the curious high school students about college life.

“The classes aren’t actually that much harder than high school, but we have grade inflation at Princeton, so. There’s a ton of events happening all the time. I joined a ballroom dancing club and an improv group, because I could. It’s pretty fun. And since I’m close to home I can come back and see high school friends and family sometimes.”

“You still haven’t visited Dr. Louis, though,” Dominique called out.

“I’ll do it over winter break!” Alex yelled back, to general laughter.

“He was a lot more stressed last year,” Maisie said to Ellen, when they were all leaving. “I think college has actually mellowed him out a lot.”

“Do you think Dom and Sal are going to end up at Princeton too?” Ellen’s mother had arrived to pick her up already, but Ellen stopped walking to continue the conversation anyway.

Maisie smiled. “We’re not allowed to talk about it in case we’ll jinx it. Sal’s orders. Also it’s kind of presumptuous. Like, what do little sophomores know about college admissions?”

“Yeah... Well, I’ll see you later.” Ellen waved and walked to her mom’s car.

“Yeah, see you.”

Maisie’s mom stopped at the grocery store on the way home, leaving Maisie in the car for a few minutes while she shopped. Maisie stared out the window in silence. She thought about college, and applications, and why she didn’t like Steve. 

 

The first day of winter break was dry and sunny, if cold. Maisie was looking forward to sleeping until noon and then watching that TV show Leihai wouldn’t shut up about. Instead, shortly after sunrise, a dreadful ringing woke her up.

“What.” 

Astaroth and Stolas were both in her room, Astaroth sitting politely on the floor because he was in his ten foot tall monstrous form. “Good morning, Maisie,” Stolas said, calmly.

“Oh fucking hell, not again.” Maisie shoved her head under her pillow. “I do not want.”

“You agreed to it. Get dressed, scrub.” Astaroth threw a bundle of clothes at her- a lightweight white cotton button-down, cargo pants, and hiking boots, all in her size.

“Where the hell are we going, and do I at least get breakfast?” Maisie asked, buttoning the shirt.

“You can grab a granola bar from the pantry before you leave,” Stolas suggested.

“Good idea, because I don’t trust any of the food you guys give me.” Maisie was dressed. She tiptoed downstairs, careful not to wake her parents, and picked up a granola bar and a water bottle.

“I’m ready to go now,” she said, crumpling up the empty wrapper when she was done. The demons faded away, and the air around her twisted and darkened again, spinning her away to an unreal place. She closed her eyes.

When she was standing firmly on solid ground again, the air around her felt...humid. Thick. Carefully, Maisie opened one eye. Then the other. 

“Wow,” she breathed. 

She was in the middle of a tropical rainforest. All around her were tall, green trees with immense leaves, bright flowers and climbing vines and mossy logs. Colorful birds chirping unfamiliar calls. Insects chattering. Everything was alive and dense and vibrating with activity.

“Where’s Ellen?” Maisie shouted into the air, because she was sure the powers that be were listening to her. They usually were.

“She’s right here. You cannot see or speak to each other while in this contest, however.” The voice, which Maisie recalled was also the host for their quiz show experience back in October, spoke in her ear at a normal volume instead of booming in the air around her. She felt a little like she was listening through headphones.

“So what’s the task?” Maisie asked, at an equally normal volume. She looked up. A backpack dropped from the sky and landed at her feet. Inside was a blank notebook, a water bottle, a mechanical pencil, a sweater that Maisie was fairly certain had been stolen from her own closet, and an eraser. 

“No bug spray?” she quipped.

“You don’t want bug spray, the voice chuckled at her. “Your task is to identify and catalog as many plants, bugs, trees, etcetera in the immediate vincity as possible, until I tell you your time is up.”

“That’s not fair,” Maisie said without missing a beat. “Ellen’s event is Invasive Species, she knows so much more about this stuff than I ever will.”

The voice chuckled, again. It sounded rather condescending, and not for the first time Maisie wished it had a physical form that she could punch in the face. “Your time starts now,” it said instead. “Go!”

“Wait, how detailed do we have to be? Like, scientific name or common name? Genus, species?”

“As much information as you can, Maisie.”

Maisie looked around herself, and resisted the urge to scream. 

She had no idea how long the task was, could have been an hour, could have been the entire day. It certainly felt like the entire day. But when the voice finally said, “that’s enough,” Maisie had managed to scribble down enough information to fill up two entire pages of the notebook.

“I shoud’ve fucking studied more zoology,” Maisie grumbled. “What do I do with the notebook?” She asked aloud.

“Just put it in the backpack, and put the backpack on your back,” the voice instructed. “And brace yourself.”

The spinning, twisting teleportation thing happened again, but this time, Maisie landed on a soft, shifting surface in a cool, dry environment, the complete opposite of the dense rainforest. She opened her eyes.

She was in the middle of a desert at night, and the sky...the sky was full of stars in a way that Maisie had never seen before, it was so bright, so vast, so beautiful

“What was the quote? ‘My god, it’s full of stars.’ I have no idea who said it but I agree with them.” Maisie said. She shivered. “I should put that sweater on.”

“Are you ready for the next task?” The voice asked, once Maisie was no longer shivering. She nodded. “Excellent. As you can probably guess, your job now is to label, identify and discuss as many stars as you can see in the sky right now, without a telescope. You may use the same notebook.”

“Thanks. Actually, can I get a blanket or something? And a flashlight, so I could actually see what I’m writing?”

The voice was silent for a minute, then said, “Check your backpack again.” The blanket and a small penlight were there. “You may begin.”

Maisie unrolled the blanket and dropped it unceremoniously on the ground, then lay down on it. She picked up the flashlight in one hand and her pencil in the other, and started copying the sky into her notebook. This time, she wrote for the entire time limit, filling up page after page. There was Casseopaeia, the Peiades, Orion and his hunting dogs. She knew the names of every star, some diameters, some ages, some life spans. But as Maisie scribbled, she wished for a moment that she had some time to just appreciate this rare moment of beauty. Not since when Stolas projected illusions of space into her room to teach her about stars as a child had she seen so many stars, so large, so bright. Maisie knew that time should be passing, and stars and planets should be fading in and out of visibility according to the hour, but the view stayed fixed, and she knew it wasn’t real after all.

“Time’s up,” the voice said eventually. Maisie tensed, expecting the awful twisty feeling to take her away immediately. But instead, there was a sensation of an invisible curtain falling, and suddenly Ellen was standing in front of her, rolled up in her comforter like a burrito. Ellen flushed. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Maisie said.

“That last test wasn’t fair, you were way more prepared than I was.”

“And I didn’t know shit about tropical species, so we’re even,” Maisie retorted. “Hey, dude, who won?” Maisie asked the sky.

“Ellen outperformed significantly on the first half of the test, but Maisie scored more overall due to her score on the second half.”

Maisie grinned. “Awesome. Astaroth’ll be hyped.” She threw her backpack over one shoulder.

“Wait, before we teleport again,” Ellen said, rummaging in her pockets. “I saw this flower, and I thought you might like it. Um.” She shoved the flower at Maisie without making eye contact.

Maisie looked at the flower. It was red and pointy, but the petals were soft. She could not have identified it at gunpoint, but she was sure Ellen could, easily.

“Thanks,” she said, after a moment.

The wind spun them apart, and Maisie was back in her room. No time had passed, but her clothes and the backpack served as a reminder that something had happened, and it was real. And the flower, still in her hand. She stared at it for a long moment, then wrapped it in tissue paper and shoved it under the stack of textbooks to dry and flatten it. Maybe she could tape it to her wall later.

“Since it’s still 8 in the morning on the first day of winter break, I’m going back to sleep,” Maisie announced to no one, and then did so. 

Maisie had an entire day of doing nothing before yet another science club meeting/holiday party happened, this time at Steve’s house. It was also the Secret Santa gift exchange meeting, so more people tended to show up for it.

Maisie stuffed the gift she ended up buying (an Adipose stress toy from Doctor Who, with the justification that even if he didn’t care about the character or show a stress toy was always useful) into a shiny red gift bag and scattered some crumpled up tissue paper on top of it. She wondered if she should include a card or not. She decided not, on the grounds that she had no idea what to write in it. “Happy holidays, I know nothing about you as a person and probably never will. Consider speaking out loud every so often.” That would go over well, she thought. 

Her mom dropped her off at Steve’s a few minutes before the party was supposed to start. And it was going to be a party, with absolutely minimal studying or education going on. Steve was probably not the right person to host such a thing, in that case, but they decided where outside of school meetings happened on a rotation and it was his turn so host he did.

Steve opened the door with his hair sticking up in all different directions, like he hadn’t brushed it yet, but he beamed anyway. “You’re here! Come on in!” He took her into the living room. “I wanted to put the gifts under the tree but then I remembered we have Jewish kids in science club and I don’t want to make them feel weird, y’know? I wonder if having a Secret Santa thing at all makes them feel weird. We probably should have asked,” he was saying. It was the longest Maisie had heard him speak uninterrupted in a year and a half of frequent interactions. He flushed, seeing her looking at him, and cleared his throat slightly. “Anyway. Put that in front of the TV, we’ll figure it out when everyone else gets here.”

Eventually everyone else did get there, and the gift exchange process began. It was fairly straightforward. The kid closest to the gift pile picked up the gift he’d bought and gave it to his person, and it continued in a clockwise circle.

Tyler was, in fact, pleased with the stress toy. At least, Maisie thought he was pleased. He sort of smiled and nodded when he said “thanks,” and he didn’t usually do those things, so she figured he at least didn’t hate it.

A freshman whose name she couldn’t remember presented Maisie with the book What If? By Randall Munroe. Maisie knew it was on the form she filled out, but she didn’t actually expect to get it. “Wow, thank you,” she managed, sitting down and opening it immediately.  Ellen looked smug. 

“Ellen helped me,” the freshman admitted, and Ellen’s smug expression was quickly replaced with embarrassment.

“Well then, thanks, Ellen.” Ellen smiled slightly in return.

Steve presented Ellen with the scarf they’d all helped picked out. “Oh my gosh, this is so soft and comfortable, and it’s the perfect color! Thank you so much!” She pulled the scarf over her head and twisted it once, spinning around. Everyone clapped. 

Maisie smiled softly. 

“It was a team effort,” Steve said, “the other officers all helped me pick.”

“Yup!” Sal beamed. Ellen had listened to Dominique and gotten him a mug that said #1 Dad on it, filled with chocolate.  Dominique took pictures for the Science Club facebook page. It was beautiful. 

Dominique and Sal had both gotten accepted to Princeton early, Dominique early decision and Sal early action. He still didn’t know where he wanted to go, since Stanford deferred him, but Dominique was ready to check out of high school completely now that her future has been locked and sealed.

Ellen had to leave early to catch a flight back to Georgia for break. “Text me so I don’t die of boredom and loneliness,” she said as she walked out the door, and everyone laughed because most of the science club members were terrible texters and communicators in general.

The party continued, and Maisie left early to go to a Maisie’s Friend Group Holiday Party, hosted by Susan. Susan had baked amazing cookies and cupcakes, and Maisie was the last one to arrive.

“So who wants to do the gift exchange now?” Susan asked, to an overwhelming exclamation of “yessss!” 

Maisie passed a small white gift bag full of nail polish and nail stickers to Joshika, who was a nail art fanatic. For her, Maisie actually drew and signed a heartfelt card summarizing years of friendship and positive memories. “Here’s to many more holiday parties with you,” the card concluded. “Is that too sappy? It’s probably too sappy, but fuck it.” 

“Aw, Maze!” Joshi hugged her tightly. Maisie carefully hugged her back. 

Leihai gave Maisie a small cardboard box, decorated in flower stickers and wrapped with shiny red string. Maisie opened it slowly, savoring the moment. Inside was a beautiful collaged card and a charm bracelet with handmade clay star charms. Leihai liked to make little things out of polymer clay for fun, so the friend group tended to get things made out of clay for birthdays and gift exchanges. It was amazing.

“Dude, holy crap, this is amazing!” Maisie fastened the bracelet onto her left arm and stuck it out in front of her, posing. “Someone take a picture.”

Leihai jumped out of her seat to join the photo, pretending to stroke the bracelet seductively. They were all laughing and having fun with their gifts, and Maisie couldn’t help but wonder what Ellen would have gotten her, if they’d known each other for as long as she’d known Leihai, if they had actually gotten each other for Secret Santa.

The day after the parties was back to the grindstone for Maisie and Ellen.

Maisie woke up to an unexpected pressure on her chest. She discovered it was Stolas, sitting on her like a freaking cat. Except he was much larger than a cat and his huge owl eyes were uncomfortably close to her face.

“Good morning,” he said.

“What now?” Maisie said, not even trying to sound polite.

‘We need to study. For the next trial, for your AP exams, for the SAT, for States... We need to study for a lot of things. And since Ellen left for Georgia yesterday, you have to study with us instead of with her.”

Maisie flopped back onto her pillow. “Stop.”

“You want to win, Maisie, don’t you?” His question wormed its way into her skull and lodged itself there, hot and dense, and Maisie remembered that Stolas was, in fact, a demon from Hell.

“Okay. Get off me.” Stolas jumped off, landing gracefully on his freakishly thin and long owl legs, and Maisie pulled on a sweatshirt and took out her textbooks, ready to get back to work. 

She’d always gotten straight As before, but with all the extra studying and pressure and working that’s been ruling her life lately, she had over a 96 in almost every single class. Everything in school felt, if not easy, then easily achievable. She liked it, or she would if she didn’t have to spend so much time and energy trying to get to that point. 

Maisie spent the day studying, and then her parents dragged her along to a family friend’s christmas party where her mother bragged about how hardworking and talented she is, and then her auntie bragged about her own child, and Maisie went to the basement to watch her cousins lose at Mario Kart. Fun.

Ellen did text her, like she said she would.

Ellen: We’re at my grandparents’ place and like I would actually rather study than talk to all these relatives send help D: D: 7:26 pm

Maisie: Lol 7:30 pm

Ellen: :( 7:31 pm

Maisie: don’t u have friends there 7:32 pm

Ellen: yeah but they’re all art kids and rly laid back 7:32 pm

Ellen: I feel like living in the north has made my life go by faster 7:33 pm

Ellen: does that make sense ??? 7:34 pm

Maisie: I guess 7:35 pm

Maisie: is it even cold down there 7:36 pm

Ellen: YES it is FORTY FIVE DEGREES OUTSIDE RIGHT NOW 7:36 pm

Maisie: LMAO 7:36 pm

Maisie: 25 degrees with a chance of snow tomorrow fight me

Maisie looked at the message for a moment, and then deleted the words “fight me” and replaced them with “:) :) :)”. She felt the smilies were just passive-aggressive enough, yet still playful.

Ellen: RUDE I’m jealous I still haven’t seen snow 7:37 pm

Maisie: I’m sure it’ll snow again in Jan or Feb 7:38 pm

“Who’re you texting?” asked a cousin. “Is that your boyfriend? Does Maisie have a boyfriend?” Maisie stuffed her phone into her pocket.

“I wasn’t texting anyone, dude. Chill,” she said, as calmly as she could manage. 

“Sure, whatever.” The cousin went back to playing Mario Kart, unconcerned. Maisie wondered why her instinct had been to lie completely instead of answer, truthfully, that she was just texting a friend.

On Christmas morning, Maisie went downstairs and saw a brand-new telescope under the tree. A good telescope. A several hundred dollars kind of telescope. The kind of telescope, in fact, that Maisie sighed wistfully over online every so often. 

“Mom, dad, what?” Maisie stammered, in Chinese.

“Your grades have been so good this year, and you’ve been doing so well in your science club, we thought you deserved something nice. And since you can’t drive yet and your laptop is fairly new...” Her mother couldn’t finish because Maisie had grabbed her in a hug. “Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!” 

Maisie went back up to her room and twisted her pendant. “You called?” Astaroth’s voice echoed in her ears.

“Merry Christmas to all of you down there,” she said.

“Thanks, kid. You too.”

Maisie cut the connection and stared out the window, onto the nice suburban neighborhood in her nice suburban town. Her parents were so proud of her, and so proud of her hard work, and she still hasn’t told them that her best friend-slash-mentor is a primordial demon from Hell. 

Ellen’s christmas was big and bright and bountiful, her grandmother’s house full of Pearsons from around the country. There were hundreds of christmas cookies on the dining room table, and piles of presents. Ellen herself got plenty of books and clothes and makeup from her cool older cousins. She took a picture of the loot, then went to the guest room she was staying in to send it in privacy.

Maisie: damn nice 2:09 pm  
Maisie: look what I got 2:09 pm

Attached was a photo of her new telescope. 

Ellen: !!! Congrats!!!! 2:12 pm

“Good for you,” Ellen whispered to her phone screen. She knew how much Maisie wanted one, and how expensive they were. While at her grandparents’, Ellen’s obsessive studying had been pushed to the background, because there were people to see, and things to do, and presents to wrap and cookies to bake. She ended up just going over her notes for a couple of hours after dinner every day, which sounded like a lot if you didn’t know how much time she spent on studying as a regular thing. She finished her winter break homework within the first two days of vacation anyway, and after that, Barachiel pulled her out of time once or twice to give her progress tests and see how much she’d been learning and improving. She opened the door and stuck her head out, looking for her mother. Her mom was standing by the fireplace, laughing at something Aunt Cora said, a glass of wine in her hand that matched her wine-colored sweater, looking like a picture from an advertisement.

“Hey mom,” Ellen started, closing the door behind her and walking over to the fireplace,  “my friend says it’s snowing in New Jersey now...can we celebrate Christmas there next year? Invite people over?”

Her mother looked over at her, thoughtful. “Your grandmother’s health will probably be too much for the journey, but we can think about it. Maybe a smaller celebration would be nice.” The living room was loud and full of people, and Aunt Cora’s five-year-old twins were running around and getting in everyone’s way. Ellen picked up a paper plate from the kitchen and filled it with cookies. In a few minutes, they were going to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, like they did every year.

Ellen: my mom says we can do Christmas in nj next year, assuming we stay in nj next year 2:13 pm

Ellen: guess she wants a white christmas as much as I do :D 2:13 pm

Maisie: it hasn’t started snowing here yet 2:15 pm

Maisie checked the weather report. There was still a forecast of snow later in the evening. She texted, “will send pix if it does snow tho”

Ellen: !!! <3 <3 <3 2:19 pm

Ellen was surprised, surprised and slightly embarrassed, at how much joy the idea of Maisie thinking about her when she went about her day gave her. She loved her Georgia friends, of course, but she’d known them all for so many years, she found herself taking their love and support for granted sometimes. She knew Maisie was still warming up to her, slowly, and the thought that she was finally getting through to her made her feel warm inside.

Maisie watched a holiday movie on TV, and finished a project due after break, and reviewed old Astronomy tests for Science Club, and stared out the window waiting for snow to fall, hoping it would start before nightfall so she could take clear photos. She ended up helping her mom prepare dinner instead to fill her time, but even that didn’t take very long, because her mother was very good at planning in advance and had made most of the meal the day before.

“I think it’s snowing now,” her mother mentioned when Maisie started setting the table. They didn’t often have dinner all together, because her mom and dad both worked late and varied hours, so Christmas deserved the nice plates and the cloth napkins. They didn’t go out on Christmas or invite people over, ever, except Maisie’s mom sometimes went to church. Christmas was just for the three of them. 

Maisie went over to the window. The sky was a deep purplish rose, grayish from the heavy clouds, and the orange street light at the curb was on bathing the dying grass and asphalt in a ghostly glow. Even in the dim lighting Maisie could see what was unmistakably huge white snowflakes falling. There wasn’t a lot of snow sticking to the ground right at that moment, but she took the picture anyway, if only to show Ellen what she’s missing.

Ellen: !!! I hope it sticks!!! 6:30 pm

Maisie: lol yeah same 6:30 pm

Ellen: ok we’re sitting down for dinner so I have to put my phone away :(( ttyl!! 6:30 pm

Maisie typed, “ttyl,” and wondered when she’d started feeling disappointed when her conversations with Ellen got cut short. The snow kept falling.

Winter break continued, largely uneventfully. Maisie and Ellen continued to text every so often, and on New Year’s, right after the countdown, Maisie’s phone rang. “Happy New Year!” Ellen shouted, laughing. Maisie could hear noisemakers and glasses clinking in the background-- evidently, Ellen was at a party. “Happy New Year,” Maisie repeated, smiling. She was home alone. Her parents had left to go to their friend’s party. 

“You’re not celebrating?” Ellen asked.

Maisie shrugged, then realized Ellen couldn’t see her. “Nah,” she said. “Leihai invited me to one of the frisbee kid’s parties, but like I didn’t want to go to a party where I only knew one person and where there’ll probably be alcohol and stuff I’m not comfortable with, y’know?”

Ellen laughed. “Yeah. I’m just here because my parents made me. All my friends are home with their families, this is just drunk adult relatives I don’t like much. I actually brought my invasive species study guides with me and started reading them while waiting for the countdown.”

“Ha! Relatable,” Maisie said.

“Yeah.”

They kept talking about their winter break experiences, about Georgia and New Jersey, about everything and nothing. Then a silence stretched across the line. “I wish you were here,” Ellen mumbled, so softly and so quickly that Maisie could’ve imagined it.

“Me too,” she said instead.

They were quiet again, just for a moment. “Good night,” Ellen said.

“Good night,” Maisie said, and ended the call. 20 minutes into the new year and she’d spent 19 of them talking to this girl she had to compete with and should probably hate. 

“What even is my life?” she asked, sliding her hand around her pendant without thinking.

“Hey. Hey Maisie. You wanna make a new year’s resolution this year?” asked Astaroth, sounding less like a scary hell demon and more like an annoying younger brother with an unusually raspy voice.

“I never make resolutions,” Maisie snapped. “Good night.”

“Fine, be that way. Happy new year bee-tee-dubs.”

“Who the fuck taught you how to say bee-tee-dubs.” 

Astaroth laughed. The sound was like nails on a chalkboard in her head, which is why he refrained from doing it often. He must be annoyed with her lack of respect.

“I apologize. Happy new year to you, too, Astaroth. Have a good night.”

“That’s better. Good night, Maisie.”

She cut the connection and felt his presence lift. Without even noticing, the amount of time she let the demons spend in her head has dwindled significantly in the last few months, even though they were technically supposed to tutor her in the competion. When they did tutor her, they manifested physically without her summoning them, like the time she woke up to Stolas sitting on her. She felt like she could think more clearly without them in there. 

School started again soon. With States coming up at the end of the month, Science Club meetings increased from once to three times a week. Maisie found herself with less time for homework and more time spent studying astronomy and practicing write it do it with Ellen, which they worked on with Sal and Dominique’s supervision and feedback during club meetings. Midterms and pre-AP reviews were also all falling at around the same time. It was not uncommon to see everyone at Maisie’s lunch table with textbooks out, scribbling homework assignments and cramming last-minute for tests. Or napping after an all-nighter. Some days, people they didn’t really know would come over and do homework with them because over time Maisie’s Friend Group Table had somehow become The Homework Table.

Leihai’s frisbee team didn’t have games in the winter because of the cold, but they did have daily conditioning that the vast majority of the team skipped. Leihai refused to, both because she was new and wanted to prove herself, and because she wanted to be, to quote directly, “built A-F.” Conditioning ended at the same time as Science Club practice, so Leihai and Maisie and Ellen all started walking home together. Leihai laughed easily and didn’t freak out about grades or school and didn’t wear a jacket over her long-sleeved exercise shirt and basketball shorts that she didn’t bother changing out of after frisbee and didn’t have anything in common with Ellen Pearson besides being friends with Maisie. The problem was, Leihai had been friends with Maisie for longer. The list of inside jokes and “remember-that-time-when-we”s and looks that Leihai and Maisie could exchange and communicate a world of information without talking stretched towards infinity, and Ellen had just convinced Maisie that they were, in fact, Friends, like a month ago.

Ellen was not jealous. Ellen did not, in fact, have anything to be jealous of. Ellen wanted to break something, which did not often happen considering the consequences she faced if she actually snapped and lashed out and expressed her frustration and anger in any way other than words. It’s not like Leihai was a bad person. Far from it. She was perfectly pleasant and explained the inside jokes and references to Ellen when she asked and laughed at Ellen’s jokes just as much as Ellen laughed at hers and invited her to join their table at lunch every so often and why did Ellen want her to just  _ leave  _ so much?

Ellen did the mature and reasonable thing, and pretended nothing was wrong while sticking her fingers in her ears and drowning out the little voice that said “you know maybe we should address this feelings thing.” She managed rather successfully for about a week, laughing off Maisie’s inquiries about what was wrong and not letting her performance slip either in class or at practice. She came home after practice one day, and after smiling and waving goodbye to Maisie and Leihai outside her house while feeling like someone had stabbed her repeatedly with a butterknife, Ellen went up to her room to find Barachiel, Guardian Angel, sitting on her bed flipping through one of her for-fun books. He looked up calmly and said, “do you want to talk about it?”

“There is nothing to talk about and I have an American History essay tomorrow I need to study for,” Ellen said, sitting down at her desk. “So if you could skedaddle that would be super-duper!” She smiled, but it felt fake even to her.

“Ellen.” The angel gave her a stern look, calculated to inflict instant guilt upon all it surveyed.  

“FINE,” Ellen snapped, blushing. “What...do you think I should talk about?” She asked, a little more calmly.

Barachiel stared at her, this stare designed to reach into her soul and pull all deeply buried and unarticulated problems and worries to the surface. Fortunately, sixteen years of facing The Stare had given Ellen some experience in handling it.

“I don’t want to,” she said, pulling her knees up to her chest. “Thinking about it makes me uncomfortable and scared and upset, so I do not want to.”

“You won’t be able to handle your emotions if you can’t address them,” Barachiel pointed out.

“Repressing is handling,” Ellen retorted. 

“Sweetheart. No,” he said, shaking his heavenly head gently. “Come on.”

Ellen sighed deeply. “Fine, fine. Okay. I am jealous of Maisie’s friendship with Leihai because they’re super close and I haven’t known Maisie for as long but I want to be that close with her. I recognize that jealousy is a vice that needs to be addressed and controlled. Is that good enough? 5 out of 5 points?”

Even as she said it, she knew something was wrong, both in her analysis and in what she felt. She was jealous of the friendship, yes, but also something else. But even as she thought about thinking about it, her brain instinctively went “nope, dangerous” and threw her back.

“4 out of 5. But a commendable attempt.”

Ellen and the angel sat in silence for a few minutes, Ellen meditating, the angel waiting. “I think...” she said, shakily and slowly, “I think...” heat rushed to her face and the words died on her tongue. 

“Just say it,” Barachiel prompted.

Ellen stuck her head behind her knees again. “But saying it would make it real.”

“Not saying it won’t make it go away.”

Ellen let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “I think I  _ like  _ like Maisie, but that’s obviously ridiculous because I’m not a  _ lesbian _ and I don’t have time for crushes and she doesn’t have time for crushes either, so the best option is to ignore it and hope it’ll go away.”

“4 out of 5. Next time, no qualifying statements, especially no qualifying statements that don’t actually qualify anything.”

“But anyway, I’m not gay! I can’t be gay,” Ellen whispered. “What would mother and daddy say? That rhymed. It wasn’t supposed to.”

She didn’t let herself think about what she wanted to do with Maisie, but she thought about whether or not she would want to do... that sort of thing with nameless, imaginary girls. She couldn’t imagine it.

“I don’t want to kiss girls in the abstract, just Maisie, so I am definitely not gay,” Ellen said, nodding with the satisfaction of a puzzle solved.

Barachiel had conjured some book from somewhere and was flipping through it. “Have you ever heard of the term ‘demisexual’? No, probably not. Demisexual means you don’t experience attraction to people you don’t already have an emotional connection with.”

“I guess that make sense. But we don’t have an emotional connection, we’re just friends forced together by the cruel machinations of the universe.” 

Barachiel gave her a look. 

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Fine.” He waved a hand, and the Hereditary Angel Contract appeared, a huge glowing white parchment curling in on itself, with letters shining from the page in gold. Barachiel also put on a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses, although Ellen was convinced those were just for show.

“Alright so, your parents said no dating until you’re 16, which will be next month, and the contract says you have to obey your parent’s wishes.”

“What? Dating? Who said anything about dating? She probably doesn’t even like me like that! We will burn that bridge when we get to it. Probably after AP Exams.”

Ellen looked up. “But what if...my parents wish that I don’t date a girl? They totally could. We’re southern.”

Barachiel waved a hand over the contract. “They can disapprove, far be it from me to remove free will, but it won’t dissolve the Blessing if they do. And if it comes to that I can have a respectful discussion with them on the subject.”

“You’re the best angel.”  
“I know. Now go do your homework.” He dissolved into a mist, vanishing to somewhere Ellen didn’t know. And for a moment, as Ellen took out her notebooks and started her assignments, she felt like everything would be okay. 

Of course, a little shouty voice in the back of her head immediately started yelling “YOU’RE TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH MAISIE” and that shattered her concentration a little.

The next day, Ellen went to school determined to Not Act Weird, after her earth-shattering realization of the previous day.

Leihai left for school earlier than Maisie and Ellen for frisbee practice reasons, but at some point in the last few weeks Maisie had started stopping by Ellen’s house and waiting for her to leave so they could walk to school together. 

“Good morning,” Maisie said, completely normally.

“Morning!” Ellen replied, voice a little too high, face a little too red. Her heart was racing and she felt a little like she had some kind of flu.  _ This is what those terrible teen romance novels warned you about.  _

“Are you okay? You seem a little off today.”

“I’m fine!” Ellen squeaked. She walked a little faster. It was rather impressive how quickly she thwarted her goal of Not Acting Weird.

When they got to school, Ellen locked herself in a bathroom stall and gave herself a pep talk. She didn’t her angel to tell her how to deal with feelings all the time. “Focus on the task at hand!” she whispered furiously at herself. “Your immediate goals are to finish the bio lab with her and Steve and Jordan, work on the chem lab, and practice write it do it. And when you do these things, you will focus on doing those specific things. Everything else is SUPERFLUOUS FREE TIME THOUGHTS!” she whisper-yelled the last part.

She heard the toilet flush. Well, that was embarrassing. She hoped whoever it was was not someone Ellen actually knew.

Ellen went to class, where they got their assignment and started working on their lab. Years of drilling and practice and just caring about schoolwork made it surprisingly easy for her to block out the unnecessary thoughts and just do the assignments. It was fine. She was fine.

She was very pleased with herself for solving this problem so quickly, because with States right around the corner, the amount of time she had to spend with Maisie increased tenfold. Their daily schedule began to look something like this: meet up in the library before class to finish last-minute homework together, school, run through write-it-do-it once during lunch with one of the other science club members supervising, school, club meeting, and then go to either the public library or someone’s house to practice write-it-do-it a few more times, before finally going home and starting homework around 6 or 7 at night.  Fridays after school they practiced for the quiz bowl, specifically.

Ellen texted Maisie the night before states.

Ellen: r u still awake 9:03 pm

Maisie: yeah 9:04 pm

Ellen: >:C we have to be up at like 5 tmrw go sLEEP 9:04 pm

Maisie: good night 9:04 pm

Maisie: don’t be nervous we already did this once and it was fine remember 9:04 pm

Ellen: u rite 9:05 pm

Ellen: good night!! <3 9:05 pm

Maisie stared at her phone for a moment, wondering why the little heart symbol was making her own heart beat faster. She scrolled through her previous messages with Ellen, but she didn’t see any hearts anywhere else, except for that snow thing during winter break. Ellen used a lot of smiley faces and frowny faces, but rarely hearts. Strange. Maisie was probably reading too much into it.

On the bus this time, they were both reading The Great Gatsby for English class, because they both had an in-class essay they next day.

“Do you like Daisy?” Maisie asked Ellen.

Ellen stuck a post-it note in her book and said, “it doesn’t matter if I like her or not, she’s not supposed to be liked, I think. She’s a symbol of the American dream. I don’t get attached to characters that just exist to represent stuff, y’know?”

Maisie looked back at her book. “I dunno, I feel bad for her. Always having to do what everyone expects her to do. But also she’s not a very good mother, so.”

“Did you know F. Scott Fitzgerald stole his wife’s work and passed it off as his own, while also trying to get her shut up in a mental asylum? I read it on the internet once.” 

Maisie didn’t respond. They both went back to reading their books.

States was far up north this time, almost in New York. The Pineborough bus got there fairly late, giving them only ten minutes to get their bearings before the competition began. Maisie scanned the room for her friend Cassie, but she couldn’t see her. “I’ll just get a donut then,” Maisie said to no one in particular, and got her donut. The budget for States was slightly higher than for Regionals, so students were provided with free donuts in addition to bagels and other food items.

She finished her donut in two bites and went to the bathroom for another totally unnecessary pep talk. “I’m calling you to let you know I am still very much prepared and not freaking out about anything. Just so you know,” Maisie said into her pendant.

“We know, kid. You’re gonna kill it,” Astaroth’s voice rasped.

“We believe in you,” Stolas’s voice whispered, more smoothly. 

“You better,” Maisie said, and cut the connection.

Maisie’s testing room was close to the cafeteria, so she said good luck to her friends and ducked inside fairly early. She spotted Cassie in a seat by the window, chatting to the girl behind her. Cassie lit up when she saw Maisie. “Yooooo!” She jumped up and they hugged.

“How have you been? You ready to kick ass and take names? Because I am. Congrats on getting silver at regionals, by the way! I’m proud of you.” 

“Congrats on fourth, Cass. I’ve been good, studying a lot, getting ready for those AP tests, all that jazz.”  
“Ooh, yeah, what’re you taking this year? I’m doing psych and Chinese, self-studying for Chinese because I’m taking French in school. Also algebra-based physics.”

“I’m just doing bio and chem. Three AP tests as a sophomore? Are you nuts?”  
Cassie laughed. “Psych is easy and I’m a heritage speaker so Chinese should be fine, physics is the only legitimately hard one. You, though! Bio and chem! Those are both killer, I’ve heard!”

Maisie smiled ruefully. “We’ll see. I’m thinking of taking Chinese next year too, because of the heritage speaker thing, but I haven’t practiced reading or writing in years so maybe it’s not such a good idea.”

“It’s really not that bad if you just use prep books and stuff,” Cassie said, taking out her calculator and pencils and putting her bag on the windowsill.  “I’m sure your parents subscribe to a Chinese-language newspaper or two you could study from. Plus it’s easier to remember things you learned once than to learn something brand-new, right? You can do it!” 

Maisie smiled. “Thanks, Cassie.” She found her assigned seat and set up for the Astronomy exam. She filled in the scantron bubbles indicating her school and name and the date, and thought about seeing the stars in a cold, cloudless desert night at the beginning of winter break, how bright they were, how large, how many. How the questions and answers on the test unfurled in the sky above her, and how that sky never shifted or changed. 

Ellen, meanwhile, remembered a hot, sticky afternoon in a jungle full of animals, invasive and noninvasive species alike, and remembered how each animal affected the delicate balance of the fragile ecosystem. She remembered jaguars and snakes and spiky red flowers, and bubbled in answers on her scantron. 

When the morning tests ended, Maisie felt a bit like she was waking up from a dream as she signed her name on the “I swear I didn’t cheat” thing on the last page of the test and passed her paper to the proctor. 

“What’d you think?” Cassie asked again, as they both walked to the cafeteria.

“The same as always,” Maisie responded.

Cassie bent her head to one side and nodded. “Fair. I’ll see you at the quiz bowl, Maze.”

“See you, Cass. Oh wait actually did I tell you? I’m on the quiz team now!”

“Oh yeah, I remember they switched you in last time! You did well. Good luck this time!”

“Thanks!” 

They went to their respective team lunch tables. “How was Invasive Species?” Maisie asked Ellen, sitting down next to her.

Ellen jumped a little, startled. “Fine,” she squeaked, like she’d been doing a lot lately. “Totally fine, actually. I think the...study session we had at the beginning of winter break helped a lot more than I expected it to.” Ellen sipped her juice pouch and stared at the table like the answer key was scratched into its surface.  
“Me too, actually. I kept thinking about it when I was answering questions,” Maisie said. 

Ellen didn’t respond, just stared at the table. She’d been doing that a lot lately, Maisie noticed. She wondered why.

Sal and Dominique descended on the both of them like helicopter parents, Sal standing over Ellen’s left shoulder, Dominique over Maisie’s right. 

“You have practiced,” said Sal.

“And drilled,” Dominique continued.

“You have worked SO HARD,”

“And you are going to KICK ASS at WRITE IT DO IT,” they said together, then Dominque added “But only if you take the time to double and triple check everything while you’re working just in case.”

“Did you guys rehearse this?” Maisie asked. 

“We’re done with college apps, so, yes,” said Sal. “We made up personalized pep talks for all our underclassmen babies.”

“Thanks, dad,” Ellen said, but she was beaming and Maisie could tell the pep talk actually made her feel better. Maisie didn’t want to admit it, but it made her feel better too, to know that these cool and smart upperclassmen cared about her in their own weird way.

After months and months of practice, write it do it was second nature to them both. Ellen and Maisie had developed their shorthand until it was almost another language of numbers and directions and standard keyboard symbols. Maisie knew when Ellen wrote “red midpiece nnw and 30 deg. front” she meant a very specific position for a very specific kind of piece.

The only thing that still tripped them up was the fact that Maisie was given more pieces to work with than there were in the final model. She was always worried she left out a piece by accident, or used two short things when there was supposed to be one long thing that looked identical to the two short things. So after Ellen had written her instructions out as quickly and clearly as possible, she made an itemized list of every piece actually used in the construction, just to easy Maisie’s paranoia.

This time around, Maisie was the second person to finish building, and her contraption looked absolutely identical to the original structure. She and Ellen high-fived.

“They might knock some points for our instructions, though, I don’t want us to get our hopes up too much yet,” Ellen muttered, looking worried.

“Aren’t you supposed to be the positive one? Dude, chill. We did great. We’re gonna medal. Maybe we won’t get first place but we’ll probably get at least bronze. Let’s go to quiz bowl.”

Since Maisie had been moved up to starter quiz person after Regionals, she’d been practicing with the rest of the team on Fridays after school in addition to their regular club meetings. Steve and Sal and Tim and Tyler had a rhythm that, with practice,  Maisie had learned to fit into. She knew which questions were Hers and which were the other guys’, and she knew that if it was a bio or chem question Tim would probably hit the buzzer first because he had Frisbee Reflexes, but if he looked at her then that meant she should answer it because she was better at those subjects than Tim, even though he was faster.

There was an entire encyclopedia of meaningful glances the quiz bowl team gave each other to let everyone know when it was okay to answer a question or give it to someone else. It was... really, really fun, Maisie thought.

They beat Alsdale again, 46-38 this time, and took pictures with the scoreboard again. It was comforting to know that winning things could become routine.

The proctor began to read the results for the individual results, and Maisie had her laptop out and an excel spreadsheet open to record scores.

“In first place for Anatomy and Physiology, Salman Ahmed and Steven Lin from Pineborough High School...” They cheered. Maisie looked around for Sal and Steve and gave them both high fives, then went back to typing.

“In first place for Astronomy, Maisie Wong from Pineborough High School...” Maisie’s hands froze over her keyboard.  _ Holy shit.  _

Someone was hugging her and someone else was yelling and she felt surrounded by warmth and happiness and goodness and for a second Maisie couldn’t remember how to breathe. She shook her friends off her and stood up and walked to the stage to collect her medal feeling a bit of deja vu, except this time the medal in her hand was a brilliant, gleaming gold. When she came back, the entire team had stuck their hands out for high-fives.

“Guys, I still need to write this stuff down,” she managed, eventually, and by that point the announcer had already moved on to Disease Detectives. 

Pineborough had a lot of high scorers, this time around. Maisie’s spreadsheet began to fill up. Finally, the announcer read out, “in second place for Write it Do it, Ellen Pearson and Maisie Wong from Pineborough High School...” and was drowned out by the cheering of the Pineborough team, which had gotten louder and louder with every event they medaled in. Which was most of them. 

“Overall awards,” the announcer boomed. Everyone quieted down. The atmosphere in the auditorium shifted from celebratory to tense, waiting. Anticipating. The Pineborough kids knew that they were among the top three, but they didn’t know where in the top three. And only first place got to go to nationals.

“In third place, Parsippany Academy of Science. In second place, Alsdale High School. In first place, and moving on to the national competition in Washington, DC....Pineborough High School.”

“OH MY GOD!!” Everyone was jumping, and screaming, and yelling, and Ellen was hugging Maisie, jumping up and down. Maisie’s stomach felt weird. It was probably just the excitement of winning. They were going to Nationals! They beat Alsdale! They were going to Nationals! Or, some of them were going to Nationals. Not all events were actually represented at the national level, so most of the freshmen and sophomores who competed in the local events didn’t go. Invasive Species, for instance, wasn’t an event at Nationals, but Ellen would still have to go with Maisie because of Write it Do it, which was. 

They took pictures with the trophy and then everyone picked up Dominique, who was the smallest member of the team, and carried her holding it, and took more pictures, and then everyone did the silliest pose they could think of, and took more pictures, this time while playing We Are Number One from Lazytown because it was an internet meme or something? And then finally Dr. Louis herded everyone out of the auditorium and onto the bus home.

Ellen fell asleep on Maisie’s shoulder on the way back. Adrenaline was running high in general, everyone excited about going to DC or living vicariously through those who were going to DC, but Maisie knew Ellen had stayed up too late the night before freaking out about the competition because she’d gotten a text saying “GO TO SLEEP if u haven’t already i mean” around midnight, so she wasn’t too surprised. Ellen’s golden curls were soft and silky and Maisie resisted the urge to stroke them. Her body was a dense, warm presence next to Maisie, and her face was closer to Maisie’s than it had ever been before.

The shutter sound effect of a phone camera snapped her out of whatever daze she’d been. Maisie looked across the aisle and saw Steve with his phone out, taking pictures. It was an unwritten Pineborough Science Club Bus Ride Law that anyone who fell asleep on the bus got pictures taken of them doing so, to be put into the end-of-the-year powerpoint in June. It was just what you did.

“Delete those,” Maisie hissed, flushing, but she knew it was a lost cause. 

“Shh. You don’t want to wake her, do you?” Steve whispered back, grinning.

Ellen lifted her head up, slowly and dazedly. “I wasn’t asleep,” she mumbled, yawning. “Anyway it’s okay, ah know y’all always take pictures of people sleeping like creepy weirdos.”

“See, Ellen says it’s fine! Anyway, do you guys want to play mafia? There’s like another half hour of bus ride left.”

“Sure,” Maisie said. “As long as I don’t have to move,” she added after a moment’s thought. 

“Ah think ah’ll go back to attempting sleep,” Ellen said, and put her head on Maisie’s shoulder again. Maisie looked away. 

Sal volunteered to be the storyteller for the game, and assigned everyone in the last three rows of the bus roles (except Ellen). Maisie was part of the Mafia, and managed to kill Tim and get Rish voted off for it despite him being innocent. Rish protested, because he was a jerk, and things got kind of loud, so Ellen yawned and said, “can y’all quiet down?” Her southern accent was always strongest when she was tired, Maisie noticed. It had the desired effect. 

When Maisie was back in her room, finishing her homework assignments, Astaroth materialized. He was wearing a new size XXXXL T-shirt that had Team Maisie written on it, possibly in dried blood. Maisie wondered where he got that thing and also why he thought it was necessary. Were demons in the underworld placing bets on their competition? 

“Congratulations,” he said. “Our records show you’re pulling ahead in the trials.”

“That’s great,” Maisie deadpanned. 

“You don’t sound thrilled,” Astaroth rumbled.

“I don’t even care anymore.” Maisie said, highlighting a passage in The Great Gatsby. “Like, why bother? I don’t really want to beat her anymore. I just want to get good grades and ace my AP exams and go to Nationals, and I don’t need you to do it anymore.”

Astaroth looked at her, and for the first time since they met, Maisie could see something resembling hurt in his eyes. “You would really be okay with never being able to talk to me again? Or Stolas? Or any of the other demons? They won’t take away your memory, either, you would be forced to live with the feeling of loss for the rest of your days.”

Maisie shoved her homework away from her and slammed her head into her elbows. “I just... I think it would be worse for Ellen if she’d lost. She has her parents to think about...”

Astaroth pursed his lips, thinking. “But wouldn’t she be disappointed if you just gave her the win? I’m sure she wants to win fair and square, especially since she has that whole sense of Angelic Rightness in her.”

“I guess.” Maisie kept her gaze fixed on a spot on her desk. She didn’t want to look at Astaroth just then.

“Do you really not mind losing us, Maisie?” Astaroth asked her, again. 

Maisie looked up. Her throat felt tight. “I do mind,” she managed, and her eyes filled with tears. “I’m just so  _ tired  _ of all this pressure, and I’m tired of feeling you guys in my head with me all the time, and I’m tired of every question missed giving me a panic attack because what if that’s the point to tip the scales? I want this all to be over, so me and Ellen could just be normal friends who aren’t literally competing for our lives.” Maisie didn’t cry very often, so she blinked quickly and the tears went away.

Astaroth looked at her sideways, with an expression Maisie had learned to recognize as “scheming.” “Just normal friends, huh,” was all he said. 

“Yes? I don’t know what you mean by that? But also, I don’t want to know, I have an essay tomorrow and need to work. Good night, Astaroth. I’ll stay in the contest for your sake. Who knows how you’ll manage without me to pester when you’re bored.” She grinned, tiredly.

Astaroth, Grand Duke of Hell, smiled too. “Good night, kid.” He vanished, in a cloud of acrid black smoke.

Nationals happened in March, two months after the state competition and with a reasonable amount of time to go before Prom and AP Exams started happening. The Science Club obtained permission for another after-school bake sale to fundraise for the competition. 

“Depending on how well the fundraiser goes,” Dr. Louis said, when they were all setting up for the bake sale at the end of the school day, having gotten permission to leave class early for such a purpose, “we’re either getting a coach bus and driving for 3 hours in one direction, or we’re getting plane tickets and flying there. Probably the bus. Total costs will hopefully be limited to just a few hundred dollars per person. Dominique?”

Dominique put down the box of prepackaged chips she was carrying and clicked open her Treasurer Excel Spreadsheet. “As it is now, if we go for the coach bus option, factoring in the grant from the school and the hotel subsidy from the National Science Competition organizers, it’s about $250 per person. Plane is about $450 per person. Honestly, not that bad for a Nationals trip. It cost 700 dollars my freshman year because it was in California. My mom was so relieved I didn’t get to go that year.”

Maisie felt immensely lucky for a moment that anything under a thousand dollars was not prohibitively expensive for her family. 

Ellen walked in, carrying a covered tupperware container full of cookies. “I brought something for the bake sale!” she said. “Raspberry and dark chocolate, with white chocolate chips. I wrote the ingredients on an index card in the container, in case people are allergic to stuff. How much will these go for?”

“50 cents a cookie, I’m thinking?” Dominique asked thoughtfully. “Also, how long do these keep for? The bake sale is all week. Are you going to bake new cookies for each day of the bake sale?”

Ellen shrugged. “They’ll be fine. And I bake when I’m stressed, so, probably. I’ve been experimenting with cookie flavors lately.” She brightened suddenly. “Hey Maisie, remember that one time I tried to teach you how to bake?”

Maisie smiled, remembering. “Yeah. That was fun.”

Ellen took a deep breath. “Doyouwanttohelpmemakemorecookiesforthisbakesalelater?” she rushed out.

Maisie gave her a look. “Uh, yes? Of course? Why are you so nervous?”

Ellen blushed, looking a bit like a deer in the headlights. “I’m not nervous,” she protested.

Maisie rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Do you want to help sell stuff or do you have to be somewhere?”

“Nah, I can help,” Ellen replied, and joined them behind the tables. Soon, classes would let out for the day, and the rush of students would descend upon the bake sale for ten to fifteen minutes, consuming all like the ancient plague of locusts consumed all the grain in Egypt. But for now, the halls were empty, and they could spread out their offerings of snacks and pizzas and drinks in peace.

“I’ll go to the bio room and run the meeting while you guys hold down the fort here,” Sal said, when the bell rang. He grabbed his backpack and headed upstairs.

“He’s just lazy. Doesn’t want to experience the plight of the retail worker firsthand,” Dominique explained, rolling her eyes at Maisie and Ellen. 

Steve grabbed his backpack and ditched, too. 

“Steve, on the other hand, is legitimately scared of large groups of people, which is a fair and valid excuse Salman Ahmed does not share.” Conversation was cut off soon after, and replaced by exchanging money for food and answering random students’ questions about how much things cost. Some kids from Maisie and Ellen’s classes stopped by and said hello, which was nice of them, but most of them had forgotten to bring money today.

Leihai bought three Gatorade bottles for herself and two of her frisbee teammates. “They better pay me back this time,” she grumbled as she passed the money to Maisie. “Good luck with your bake sale! I’ll probably buy stuff from you every day. Our state tournament’s coming up too, by the way.”

“Oh yeah, you told me! Good luck!” said Maisie.

“Yeah, good luck,” Ellen echoed.

Leihai did the finger-guns thing and walked away.

Eventually, the flood slowed to a trickle, and finally there were only a few athletes running up to ask if they’re selling the leftovers for half-price now that they were packing up for the day.

“Pizza’s a dollar a slice now, donuts are fifty cents, everything we can sell tomorrow is the same price,” Dominique recited.

“Cool.” The sports kids paid, and Dominique locked up the cash box and gave it to Dr. Louis for safekeeping. 

Ellen’s cookies were a hit, and her tupperware had but a few crumbs left in it for her to take home. “Ellen, you can go up to the meeting, you’re not an officer so you don’t need to help clean up right now,” she said.

“That’s fine, I want to,” she insisted. 

“There’s not that much to do,” Maisie said, stacking up the cardboard boxes on the cart. “But I mean, okay.”

They wheeled the materials cart full of leftover food into the Science Workroom, then made their way upstairs.

“So, after the meeting, you want to come over and help me bake more cookies?” Ellen said.

“Yes, of course.”

Club meetings nowadays were almost always Write it Do it practice for Ellen and Maisie, since it was a lot easier to make sure they didn’t accidentally cheat when there was someone else watching and timing and grading them. Quiz bowl practice was now every other club meeting, and Ellen, being an alternate, practiced with them every so often. Sal made a few announcements regarding nationals, expenses, permission slips and t-shirt forms and talked about the celebratory Science Club dinner at the Korean barbeque place at the mall for after nationals. He handed Ellen a box with a model in it and sent her into the hall to write her instructions, while Maisie reread her astronomy notes and waited for the timer to ring. Science Club members who weren’t going to nationals showed up to do homework and hang out with their friends. Maisie was slightly jealous of them, and their lack of stressing about nationals. And the fact that they wouldn’t be stuck on a bus with fucking Rish for three hours.

Ellen came back inside with her instruction sheet written out and timer reset. She passed the items to Maisie at the door, the movement practically instinctive after so many practice sessions. Maisie built her structure and hit stop on the timer when there were five minutes remaining, then stuck her head in the door and yelled “someone come grade this for me!”

Steve volunteered. He graded it. It was very accurate. 

Sal came over and examined the k’nex structure too. “Okay, so starting next meeting, you guys are going to practice with nontraditional materials. We’re talking pipe cleaners, cotton balls, styrofoam cups. Legos and Lincoln Logs. Here in New Jersey we always use K’nex, but at Nationals they can and will try everything possible to mess you guys up.”

Maisie wrinkled her nose. “Gross. But we can do it.”

Ellen grinned. “Yeah!”

The meeting adjourned, and Maisie and Ellen began to walk home. Leihai’s frisbee practices went longer now that tournaments were coming up and it was technically above freezing outside and therefore okay to practice on the field, so she didn’t join them. 

“Have you still not told your parents I’m the demon girl?” Maisie asked.

Ellen tilted her head sideways and looked at the sky. “Well...they haven’t asked, so... Anyway, my dad works late and my mom’s away on a business trip today, so you don’t need to worry about that now.”

“That explains the sudden invitation, I guess,” Maisie said.

Ellen flushed. “Shush.”

They reached the abandoned train tracks. Maisie jumped up on the thin rail and walked it like a balance beam, both arms out. Ellen resisted the urge to try and catch her when she wobbled. “I don’t understand why you’re so scared, though,” Maisie said after a moment. “Of your parents, I mean. Like what do you think they’re gonna do to you or me? I’m sure the angel thing prevents them from actively harming either of us, right? What have they been doing to you the whole time this was going on?”

Ellen shrugged. “Mostly they talk to Barachiel instead of me. He gives them status updates and stuff, and he’s always informative and trustworthy and precise unlike me. They’ll probably ask you a lot of questions and then decide you’re trying to sabotage me somehow and tell me I’m not allowed to interact with you outside of the contexts of the competition, which won’t change anything because our entire life is within the contexts of this competition.” She laughed. “They never really got the hang of wording their rules very specifically. I’m a lot better at avoiding what they want from me than they are at making me do things.”

Maisie just looked at her. “Well, okay, I guess,” she said eventually. She didn’t really know what to make of this information. Sometimes it sounded like having demons in your head gave her more freedom than Ellen’s angelic blessing, even though an angelic blessing is by definition supposed to have a positive effect on your life. The train track ended, and she hopped off the rail, landing neatly on both feet. Ellen applauded, and Maisie bowed slightly.

They reached Ellen’s house without much further discussion. “So, should we make the same cookies I made today, or something different?” Ellen asked, pulling ingredients out of cupboards and the refrigerator. “I have this awesome green tea cookie recipe but I don’t know how marketable green cookies are. Especially because it’s not Saint Patrick’s Day for a few more weeks.”

“Let’s just make the same ones, since we know they work,” Maisie said. 

Ellen hummed in agreement. “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. Here’s the measurements for the dry ingredients and some measuring spoons, can you dump the right amounts of flour, salt, baking soda and cocoa into one bowl and combine them? ”

“I take chemistry, I was born to measure accurately,” Maisie replied, and stuck the 1-cup measurement into the paper bag of flour.

Ellen pulled out a bottle of Polish raspberry syrup, a box of cocoa powder, and a big bag of white chocolate chips from the pantry. 

“We could also use raspberry preserves or cook fresh raspberries into a syrup thing, but this is a high school bake sale and not the Food Network, so why buy a cow etcetera,” she said.

“Why buy a cow?”

“Why buy a cow when powdered milk is so cheap? It was one of the code phrases the people working on the atom bomb used to communicate their test results. Don’t ask me why I know this. I don’t actually remember why I know this. I think I read a book about secret codes once...” Ellen started to combine the wet ingredients together with a mixer, but stopped before pouring in the syrup. “Actually wait. Can you check the freezer and see if there’s any frozen raspberries in there?”

Maisie checked the freezer and found a packet of frozen raspberries, but it felt like they were all frozen together in a big lump. She reported these findings.

“Just whack it against the counter until they separate. Don’t over do it, though, whole raspberries are prettier than bits of raspberry. I want to try adding those into the chocolate batter with the chips and see what happens.”

“Why do they have to be frozen?” Maisie asked in between whacks.

“So the moisture from the berries doesn’t mess up the composition of the cookies. It might mess it up anyway, especially if they’re all covered in ice bits. I haven’t tried this before but let’s see what happens!” 

Ellen gradually added the flour mixture to the butter mixture and beat it gently. “Okay, now add the chocolate chips,” she said. Maisie passed her the cupful. 

“Actually,” Ellen began, shutting the mixer off for a second. Maisie sighed. “Instead of half a cup of white chocolate chips how about we do a quarter cup each of white and dark chocolate chips?”

“I thought we were just going to do the same recipe as last time because we know it worked?”

Ellen stuck her tongue out at her. “That’s no fun. Do you want to make the best cookies ever or not?” 

Maisie smiled, relieved that whatever had been causing Ellen to act all nervous lately seems to have dissipated. 

Ellen located the dark chocolate chips and added them in with the raspberries anyway. She handed Maisie a spoon. “Put spoonfuls of dough on this baking sheet. If the raspberries are sticking out put more chocolate dough over them,” she instructed.

Maisie did so. “Hey, you know what I just realized? This is kind of like Write it Do it. You’re telling me what to make, and I’m making a thing.”

“Not true, I did most of the work,” Ellen said. “But we could totally practice WIDI-style baking. Or, you could find a recipe on the internet and follow it, like a normal person.”

Maisie grinned at her. “But why would I do something like that when I’m friends with you?”

Ellen looked at her, startled, color rising in her face. “Anyway,” she said, after a moment, looking away. “Did you turn the oven on?”

“Yeah. I think it’s done preheating.”

“Okay, great.” Ellen stuck the tray in the oven and set the timer. “They’ll be ready in about eleven minutes, and then we’ll need to take them out and let them cool. What do you want to do while we wait?”

Maisie shrugged.

“Have you seen this one youtube video about the History of Japan? It’s really funny,” Ellen said, pulling out her laptop.

“I don’t really watch youtube videos. No time,” Maisie explained. “And I can’t focus if I have something on while I’m doing homework, you know?”

“That’s fair, I guess, but like, making time for relaxing with funny youtube videos is important. Here, look at this! It’s nine minutes long, which is the perfect length of time for these cookies.”

“Japan is a tiny island across the sea, and it’s ~beautiful~...” the tinny voice began.

“This is great,” Maisie said, laughing as the jingly voice sound sang about how it was time for world war one.  The video ended, and the timer beeped only a few seconds later.

“I told you it was the perfect video,” Ellen said, jumping up and pulling the tray out.

“I can’t even explain why it’s so funny, but it’s so funny?” Maisie said.

“While we’re not doing anything and waiting for these to cool,” Ellen said, clicking the search bar. “There’s some other videos you might like to see...”

“You know, I think this is the longest amount of time we’ve spent together without doing any homework or science club stuff at all,” Maisie said a few minutes later, when they were watching some cartoon unicorns Ellen was appalled to learn Maisie had never heard of before.

“Is it?” Ellen asked, not making eye contact.

“Yeah. I don’t think I’ve hung out with someone for fun like this one-on-one since like, sixth or seventh grade. Like it’s either my entire friend group together or I’m doing homework by myself.”

“Well, we’re baking these for the science club bake sale,” Ellen reminded her, “so it’s technically science club related after all.”

She went back in the kitchen and tested a few cookies with her finger. “I think we can try these now,” she said.

Maisie took one and broke it in half, giving half to Ellen. They looked at each other and took a bite at the same time. Maisie chewed slowly, and swallowed, feeling a little bit like a food critic.  “This is better than the ones you made last time,” she said. “They taste like fancy rich people cookies.”

“Ha!” Ellen said. “These are good though, I agree. The raspberries aren’t integrated into the dough as much, but they’re also not as sour, and the texture’s really interesting too. I’ll have  to make some notes for next time.”

“Can I take a few home to give to my parents?” Maisie asked. “I know they’re all for the bake sale, but like...” she trailed off.

“Yes, of course,” Ellen said. She retrieved a ziplock bag and gave it to Maisie to stuff with cookies, which she did.

They both kind of stood there awkwardly for a while, Maisie suddenly aware that this kitchen was too small and they were both standing too close to each other.

“I have homework,” Maisie said, after what felt like an eternity. “So like. This was fun and all but yeah.”

Ellen let out a breath. “Yeah, of course. Thanks for helping me bake these. Maybe we could do this again some time.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Maisie pulled on her puffy red coat, grabbed her backpack and opened the front door. “See you tomorrow,” she said.

“See you tomorrow,” Ellen replied, smiling. Her heart was beating way too fast and she hated herself for it.

It was already dark outside, but it got dark early in February. Maisie walked home quickly, holding the bag of cookies with both hands. 

They didn’t bake cookies again that week, studying taking precedence over having fun as usual. They settled into a routine that left little time for entertainment and a lot of time for education. Maisie found herself staying up later and waking up earlier than she used to, and napping during lunch. Her grades weren’t slipping, of course, but it was obvious something was up. In French one day during Turn and Discuss with Your Partner Time, Leihai turned to Maisie and asked her, “Are you doing okay? Because you seem really tired and stressed out and like, as your friend, I’m concerned.”

Maisie rubbed her eyes with a tired fist and mumbled, “yeah, I’m fine. It’s just, with nationals and AP tests coming up and everything, and my dad wants to sign me up for SAT prep classes soon too... I  feel like I should get a hobby or something so I don’t spend all my time thinking about tests and classes, but also I don’t have time for a hobby. I don’t have time for anything until the summer, and even then my mom made me apply to like three research internships for high school students.”

She laughed bitterly, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, we’re supposed to be talking about the French homework problems, not my problems.”

Leihai looked awestruck “Are you kidding? This is the first time you’ve opened up to me in multiple years of friendship, Maisie. This is a very important moment. And we both know we got everything right anyway, subject-verb agreement as a concept can suck it.”

Maisie grinned and remembered how grateful she was to have such an awesome friend. “Well, since we’re both ignoring the assignment, do you have any life problems to discuss with me?”

Leihai smiled. “Not right now, but thanks for asking. I’ll be sure to cash that in when I actually need it. Best friends forever?”

“Best friends forever.  _ Les meillures amies sont eternelle _ ?”

“Something like that, anyway.” They high-fived with both hands, and went back to pretending to check their French homework. 

Maisie blinked and before she knew it they were on a bus to Washington D. C. on their way to Science Competition nationals. They left school early Thursday morning. Thursday afternoon was opening ceremonies. Friday and Saturday were competitions and fun free activities for all the students, and on Sunday morning awards were announced and everyone went home. Fun.

The bus was dark and people were trying to sleep despite the glaring golden light of the rising sun peeking through the windows. It felt very much like the 6 am bus rides to Regionals and States, except this was a coach bus instead of a school bus, so the seats were softer and there were ports for charging phones and little TV screens for movie watching. Sal, Dominique and Tyler played rock-paper-scissors for the movie. Dominique won, and the entire tour bus of whiny teenage nerd children was subjected to High School Musical.

“There’s a Scholastic Decathlon competition in the movie, it will MOTIVATE and INSPIRE US,” she yelled, over the complaints.

“WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER!” Ellen cheered. 

“Of course you liked High School Musical,” Maisie said, rolling her eyes. They were sitting together. Despite the bus having enough space for everyone to have their own two-seater, everyone bunched together near the front for “extra bonding time,” which Sal said everyone needed.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Yes, it’s campy and ridiculous, but the songs are catchy and it’s fun to pretend high school is actually like that. This movie was my absolutey favorite at age seven and I am absolutely not ashamed of that.”

Maisie considered it. “I suppose that’s fair.”

An hour later, everyone was deeply invested in the lives of the East High Wildcats in spite of themselves. “Why is the nerd clique so upset that whatshername likes hiphop dancing? Like, Tim, you’re in Chinese club right? You do the hiphop dance stuff? DOES ANYONE ELSE FEEL NEGATIVELY ABOUT THE FACT THAT YOU ALSO DO HIPHOP DANCE STUFF? No! Because having other hobbies and interests is important and healthy and on top of that makes you a valuable and well-rounded college applicant,” Sal raged, as the teenagers danced around their implausibly clean and large cafeteria. “FUCK the status quo, man!”

“That’s not how science competitions work! That’s not how math works! How do you even grade the ability to pour a liquid from a beaker into a flask?” Sal yelled at the tiny screen at the movie’s climax.

“Dude, chill, it’s just a Disney TV movie,” Tim said.

“We’re all in this together, Sal. Do not question the power of the Wildcats,” Dominique intoned.

“Getcha head in the game,” Steve responded, in such a serious tone that Maisie laughed in spite of herself.

“Anyone who comes up with a better and more plausible plot for the climax of this movie gets a free snack of their choice from the rest stop,” Sal proclaimed, and soon everyone was taking out pen and paper and working on their screenwriting skills. 

“Couldn’t they just...tell Mrs Darbus they need to reschedule the callback time?” Maisie asked Ellen.

“She had been clearly established as an unreasonable and overly dramatic personality, so obviously she’d say no. This is why I have a better grade in English than you do, Maze. I can analyze characters.”

Maisie shoved her gently. “Shut up.”

“Do you think anyone’s actually going to get that rest stop snack?” Ellen asked, looking around at the scribbling masses.

“No, but I do think everyone would rather write High School Musical fanfiction than do homework or cram for their events. Except Tyler, I guess. I think he’s playing Pokemon, look.”

Ellen looked. “Nerd,” she whispered, and they both snickered. 

“Have you been to D. C. before?” Maisie asked, a few minutes later.

“Yeah, once with my parents, to see the cherry blossoms. It was pretty nice, but I don’t remember much. You?”

“ A few times, with different relatives, for tourist things. I’m pretty excited for the Air and Space Museum? It was really fun when I was ten, but also I was ten, so. Might just be nostalgia goggles.”

“I don’t think I’ve been to any of the museums,” Ellen said, staring out the window. “At least, I don’t remember any of them.”

“I think a lot of my memories of D. C. are mixed up with my memories of TV Shows set in D. C. Like the West Wing, and Scandal.”

“I thought you didn’t watch TV.”  
“I usually don’t, but Leihai’s really into them and I’ve seen a few episodes just because I’m friends with her, y’know?”

“Yeah.” Ellen rummaged through her backpack and pulled out her American History homework.  “Maybe we can get extra credit for American History if we go to the Washington Monument or something.”

“That’d be nice. Actually wait, I’m going to email Wilson about it.”

“Bet you a cookie he’ll say you don’t need extra credit or that it won’t be fair if the opportunity isn’t equally available to everyone or something like that.”

“Not taking you up on that,” Maisie replied.

After High School Musical, Sal and Tyler arm wrestled for the next movie. Sal won easily. He put on Monty Python, which would of course appeal to everyone on the nerd science bus. 

“...is it really sad I haven’t seen this movie before?” Ellen whispered, while everyone else recited the dialogue along with the characters.

“Yes. Even I’ve seen it. My French teacher put it on in class on the last day of ninth grade.” That was the first time Maisie had seen Monty Python. It was poorly dubbed in French, but still somehow enjoyable. And the subtitles were in English, so Maisie could still understand what was going on.

“It’s cool seeing where all these lines I’ve heard before originally came from,” Ellen admitted. “Although the castle Anthrax scene is extremely uncomfortable.”

“Yeah,” Maisie said, distantly. She was watching Ellen burst into shocked laughter every other sentence, smiling and being concerned and whispering “Arthur no” whenever the king did something particularly silly. She loved how emotional Ellen was when she watched movies, not like Maisie, who had an excellent poker face and only ever cried at that opening sequence in Up. 

Then she realized this was probably weird and she should snap out of it, so she did. 

“I took a logic class at summer camp once,” she said, “and in the logic class we used the witch burning scene to learn about syllogisms.”

“That sounds like a lot of fun!”

“It was.” Maisie looked at the floor, at her English book, anywhere but Ellen’s face. She remembered what Stolas told her the last time they talked: the last trial of the year will be right after Nationals, while all the material they’ve learned is still fresh in their minds. They’d stepped up studying a lot, but the thought of the competition finally ending made Maisie’s heart race. It had taken over her entire life, and she didn’t know who she would be when it was done, regardless of who won or lost.

They pulled into the hotel parking lot around noon, where a perky college student in a Science Competition shirt greeted them and directed them to their rooms. The four girls on the team (Dominique, Maisie, Ellen, and a quiet junior named Ankita who rarely came to meetings but scored very high on Forensics anyway) were all in one room. Dr. Louis had her own room, and the eight boys were split into two rooms. 

“Oh my gosh we have gift baskets,” Ellen said, upon opening the door. The gift basket was wrapped in cellophane, and full of cookies from Capitol Cookies and other miscellaneous snacks. 

“It’s so we don’t have to spend money on those hotel snack things, probably,” Maisie replied. They took some pictures posing with the gift basket, and then unwrapped it and tried the Capitol Cookies. Maisie secretly thought the chocolate-raspberry ones she made with Ellen tasted it a lot better.

“Right,” said Dominique, tossing her duffle bag onto a bed. “Ankita and I can share one of the beds, and Maisie and Ellen can share the other. Sound good?”

“Sure.” Ankita threw her bag onto the same bed as Dominique’s.

“That works.” Maisie very carefully did not look at Ellen.

“Yup,” said Ellen, in a slightly strangled voice. “Fine by me.”

“Great. Let’s go see what the boys are up to.”

They were arm-wrestling in the room next door to determine who was sleeping in which room with who. 

“What about like...having a conversation, or asking people what they prefer?” Maisie asked, staring as Sal and Rish battled while Steve timed them and made notes on a napkin.

“This is the most masculine and least homo way of making decisions,” Steve explained. “And it’s fun.”

Sal won. Rish swore. “If we don’t like the results we could just ignore them. Calling it now, the arrangements will be: Me, Steve, Tim, and Tyler in here, and Rish, Robert, Matt and Imraan are in the other room.”

“So then what’s the point of this thing?”

“HONOR AND GLORY. Okay, Imraan and Tim, you’re up.” The boys sat down next to the desk and put their elbows on the table.

“This is absolutely ridiculous and I am totally recording it for our Facebook page,” Dominique said, pulling her phone out. Sal stood up and smiled at the rest of the science club kids while Imraan and Tim battled it out. (Tim won, but it was a near thing.)

“So, opening ceremonies are in two hours, what do you guys want to do until then? Besides this. We’re hitting up all the museums tomorrow and Saturday.”

“We could...go get lunch?” Ellen suggested tentatively. “It’s around lunch time now...”

“Brilliant. Anyone have ideas? We could eat in the hotel restaurant but it’s probably mad overpriced. I’m checking Yelp. What does everyone feel like?”

Everyone shrugged, not willing to be decisive. “I’m still sad Gettysburger isn’t real, to be honest,” admitted Maisie. Everyone looked at her blankly.

“What, none of you have seen Scandal? Shameful.” 

“There’s a pizza place nearby that has really high ratings. Is everyone okay with pizza?” Dominique asked, scrolling through an article on her phone.

“We don’t have to take public transit to get there, right?” Ellen asked.

“Nope, it’s just a few blocks of walking.” 

“Sure,” everyone responded. 

Dr. Louis elected to stay in her room and nap, saying “I trust you all to get back here in one piece, probably without getting arrested.”

The group made its way to the lobby. Sal pulled up google maps on his phone, insisting that as president he rightfully deserved to lead the way to this place none of them have ever been to, and they set off.

“Aren’t we supposed to be pizza snobs? Like, ‘everything outside of New York City and New Jersey is terrible fake pizza” kind of snobs?’ My north jersey friends are like that,” Maisie said, when they reached the crosswalk. D. C. so far looked exactly like every other city Maisie had ever been in, probably most similar to Philadelphia.

“We’re from central New Jersey, equally loyal to Philly and NYC,” Dominique replied. “Which means we call long sandwiches “hoagies” instead of subs or heroes, for some strange reason.”

“Also I think since most of us are first-generation immigrant kids,” said Tim, “we don’t have nearly as much loyalty to New Jersey The State than people like... I dunno, Stephanie Schwartz. Tyler, where are you from?”

“My dad’s Russian, but my mom’s standard-issue White American. I can’t speak Russian so I’m basically just American, I guess, except my mom doesn’t have pizza opinions that I know of so maybe we’re not really from New Jersey after all. I don’t actually know where specifically she grew up, but I get the feeling we moved to Pineborough for the school district like most parents...” Tyler shoved his glasses further up along his nose, and stared at the asphalt. That was the longest Maisie had ever heard him speak.

“Dude. That would make a great college application essay,” said Sal. “Colleges fucking love ethnic heritage angst. Everyone take notes.”

“Ellen, do you have any weird specific Georgia family things?” asked Dominique.

“Uh,” Ellen started, looking around. “There’s a peach tree in my grandma’s backyard....and a Rebel flag on her neighbor’s porch.”  
“Rebel flag?”

“Battle flag of the Confederate Army,” she explained.

Everyone simultaneously made sympathetic “oooh” noises. “Ah. Yikes.”

“I dunno, growin’ up in Georgia was just a lot of farmland and guns and churches and yelling about traffic in and around Atlanta. Atlanta is extremely poorly designed, for a major city. We lived about forty minutes away, though.” Her accent got more pronounced as she remembered her hometown.

They reached the pizza place. The decor was far too classy for a pizza place, but that was to be expected from something with the highest rating on Yelp. 

“Man, this doesn’t look anything like Giotto’s,” said Rish. Giotto’s was the pizza place across the street from Pineborough High School, and its design was heavily influenced by midcentury diners. Lots of plastic, chrome and never-quite-scrubbed grime. It was where the clubs ordered pizza for their bake sales, and where seniors went out to for lunch. Vinnie Giotto was a freshman at Pineborough currently, but none of the Science Club kids really talked to him.

“Let’s get a large cheese, a medium pepperoni, and then a medium with whatever you guys want?”

“Our special is the chicken pesto pizza,” the cashier said hopefully. 

“I’m a vegetarian,” said Ankita.

“Yeah, same,” added Imraan.

“Okay, how about half that and half what you guys like?”

“Green peppers and mushroom?” said Ankita.

Imraan made a face. “You know what, just cheese is fine.”

“Laaaame,” Dominique teased him, and everyone laughed. They ordered some miscellaneous extra things and shoved two tables together to make room for everyone.

“Does anyone here enjoy pineapple on pizza?” Steve asked. 

“No!”

“Ew!”

“Disgusting and an abomination!”

“It’s okay I guess,” said Maisie. Everyone stared at her, appalled. “What?”

“You’re supposed to either love it or hate it! Stick to the status quo!” Sal yelled.

“I don’t think that’s what it means to stick to the status quo, my guy.” 

“If you wanna be cool, follow one simple rule, don’t mess with the flow, no, no...” Ellen sang quietly. Everyone cracked up.

They ate their pizza, ending up with some leftovers they decided to take back to the hotel for midnight snack purposes, or maybe even dinner the next day. “We get a free dinner today, and free breakfast and lunch tomorrow,” Sal explained. “We’ll have to figure out dinner plans for Friday and Saturday.”

Steve checked his watch. “Might as well head back now, it took us twenty minutes to walk here and the opening ceremony starts in half an hour. Good thing we’re all wearing our team shirts now and don’t need to change into them.”

The Pineborough Science Club shirts were a point of pride for the club. Sal’s older sister Mal was a graphic design major at an art school, and she’d been designing free shirts for her baby brother’s club activities since he was in middle school. Their shirts were always beautiful, original, easy to understand and cheap to print, and also another thing that gave them bragging rights over their rival schools. Maisie wondered if she’d keep doing it after Sal graduated and she had no reason to keep helping them anymore. Maybe she’d ask for payment and they’d have to find space in the budget for a semi-professional graphic designer.

Anyway, they looked fantastic. The team walked into the ballroom where the opening ceremony was being held like they owned it. Dr. Louis woke up from her nap and joined them.  Their seats were near the front of the room, shiny gilt upholstered chairs that looked like they were trying to be from the 18th century but didn’t really understand how to do that. An information packet and a few other sundry items of welcome had been deposited on each chair.

“Do you guys know anyone from other states here yet?” whispered Sal, scanning the crowd. “Because I have some friends from past competitions but I don’t see any of them here...”

“One of my friends from summer camp a few years ago is on a team in Pennsylvania, but I don’t know if they made it to nationals,” said Maisie.

“The Pennsylvania team isn’t here yet anyway, I don’t think,” Steve replied. He pointed to a row of empty chairs across the aisle with a piece of paper taped to them that said PENNSYLVANIA.

“Dang.”

The opening ceremony started eventually, and it was about as exciting as most opening ceremonies were: not very. There were speeches. A local school choir sang some song that everyone forgot immediately. What was fun, though, was that immediately after the opening ceremony there was a scavenger hunt, designed to get everyone out and talk to students from other states. Everyone was given a card with a colored shape on it, and people with the same shape were on the same team. No one from the same state had the same shape, forcing everyone to meet and interact with new people.

Maisie was shoved together with students from Kentucky, Ohio, Wyoming and Arizona. “I have never met anyone from any of these states before,” she said, and they laughed. The ice was successfully broken. They decided to name their team “Kowaj (pronounced ‘kawaii’),” using the first letter of each of their respective home states.

The scavenger hunt required running around the hotel and finding various hotel things, as well as science things. One of the components was to record a member of the team singing the Elements song by They Might Be Giants and post it to the National Science Competition facebook page. The Ohio kid was the only one who knew that song.

“Are you serious? In my 6th grade science class my teacher played this at the beginning of class whenever we had a pop quiz. I have this like, Pavlovian response of fear and panic whenever I hear it. But it’s also so catchy,” Ohio Kid said. Maisie thought his name might be Patrick, but she’d managed to forget it already.

Maisie volunteered to film the video, and the rest of the group functioned as backup dancers interpreting the lyrics while the kid sang.

“We should get extra credit for this,” said Arizona Girl, (whose name was Elizabeth) when they were all watching the video after. Maisie clicked post.

“Okay, what’s next?”

Kentucky Kid checked the list. “Go to the restaurant and take a picture of the liquid nitrogen machine thing. We’d have to ask the chef about it to do that...” They all exchanged a look. The look clearly communicated a sense of “deeply uncomfortable with asking strangers for favors.”

“Y’all, I’m sure a bunch of teams have already done this, they probably just have the machine sitting out on the counter for our benefit. Let’s go check it out,” said Wyoming Kid.

“That’s a good point,” said Maisie. So they went, and the liquid nitrogen machine was in fact sitting out on the counter with an index card in front of it bearing the National Science Competition logo. Perfect.

As they were taking the photo, a woman in an NSC shirt came running up to them. “Hey guys, just a heads up, you have to be back in the ballroom in ten minutes.”

“Okay, thanks.” The woman ran away.

They looked at each other. “Does anyone know where the ballroom is in relation to where we are right now?” asked Maisie.

“Let’s just follow her,” suggested Elizabeth, so that’s what they did.

By the time they returned to their teams, Maisie had added everyone on Facebook and exchanged numbers with Elizabeth, the only other girl in her scavenger hunt group. They had hit it off fairly well, and Maisie was thrilled with how nice everyone was. It might be a competition, but if you’re finally in a group of strangers who share your interests and have similar experiences, might as well make some new friends.

Ellen plopped down next to her, holding a pineapple. “Why do you have a pineapple?” Maisie asked.

“It wasn’t on your list? Weird,” Ellen said. “We got more than half of the stuff on our list, beat that.”

“Don’t really care, but okay.” Ellen always got riled up when Maisie seemed unenthusiastic about something she really cared about, which is why Maisie did it as often as possible.

“Maisie! We are here to HAVE FUN and learn about our competition’s weaknesses to exploit them in the future! Did you find out what events the people in your group are doing?”

Maisie thought for a moment. “Uh...I think one of them was doing Geology... We didn’t really talk about the competition, we were too focused on getting more items on our list than you.”

“I thought you said you didn’t care?” Ellen grinned, leaning closer to Maisie. 

“Well,” Maisie started, but the feedback from the announcer’s mic made them all snap to attention. 

“The results for the National Science Competition Scavenger Hunt are in! First, the runner ups: team Quasar, team Dino-stars, team Nerds Candy, and team... the letter A, repeated ten times.”

“It’s pronounced AAAAAAAAAA,” yelled Dominique helpfully, and everyone laughed. 

“Well. Congratulations, runner ups! You all get backpacks of NSC goodies.” The runner-up teams went on stage and collected their loot. Dominique pulled a pair of sunglasses from the backpack’s front pocket and put them on immediately. “Take my picture,” she asked, and Maisie obliged.

“And we have a special prize for team....Kowaj? For Best Video posted to the NSC Facebook Page,” the announcer continued. Maisie jumped up.

“Suck it, nerds!” she shouted to her team, and went up. 

Each team member got a Raspberry Pi mini-computer. Raspberry Pi was used to teach programming and engineering skills to children, and were known for being super customizable and fun. “Dude, this is awesome,” Elizabeth whispered to Maisie, wide-eyed, and she nodded. She wasn’t super into programming, but she was planning on taking a computer science class over the summer and testing into AP Computer Science for the next school year, so this would probably be a fun way to learn the concepts.

“And congratulations again to team Kowaj for winning third place in the scavenger hunt!”

From the platform, Maisie could see her team applauding and cheering, and she squashed an embarrassed smile. Someone handed her a heavy backpack with the NSC logo on it, evidently more full of things than Dominique’s runner up bag was.

“Congrats,” Ellen said, hugging Maisie briefly. 

Her team won second. She wasn’t as smug about it as she could have been. They compared goodies.

“I’ll trade you my 3D pen for your Raspberry Pi,” Ellen whispered, while the announcer was talking about how the competition will proceed tomorrow.

“No chance in Hell,” Maisie whispered back. 

Eventually, whatever the announcer was talking about came to a conclusion, and the coaches began handing out meal tickets.

“They’re staggering dinner for some reason, and we’re in the third group so we’re eating at 7:30. Check off what you want for each course,” Dr. Louis explained, giving everyone a card with several choices of starter, main course, drink and dessert.

“This is fancier than senior prom,” Dominique said, the only one among them who had been to senior prom before. She uncapped her pen with her teeth and filled out the card, still holding the cap in her mouth.

“And junior prom,” Sal added. Steve got a strange look on his face when he said that. Sal smirked and glanced at the juniors in their group- Ankita, Tim, Imraan and Steve. “The food is going to be like cafeteria lunch food, served buffet-style, except you may or may not also have a chocolate fountain.”

“My friend Ruchi’s on the class council and she says if we get the chocolate fountain the tickets are going to be almost a hundred bucks,” said Ankita.

“No chocolate is worth that shit,” said Tim.

“Are you guys done?” Dr. Louis collected the cards. “You’re all free to do whatever until 7:30. Dress nice,” she said, walking away.

There was a pause.

“Well,” said Sal, clapping his hands. “I’m going to go study for anatomy like the wonderful role model I am. If you see me playing video games I give you permission to take my DS and hide it.” 

“I’m going to do chem homework,” said Ellen. 

“Same, I guess.” said Maisie.  “We can check our answers with each other.”

“If you need chemistry help you can ask literally any of us,” said Steve. “We all took AP chem before.”

“Ellen has the highest grade in all of Patel’s classes. I TA for Patel during my study hall and I’ve graded a lot of your labs, trust me on this,” Imraan said.

Ellen looked embarrassed. “Highest grade in all her classes, huh? She’s not really that complimentary in class...”  
“She doesn’t want you to get a big head about it, but trust me, she loves you both. If you need a letter of recommendation for anything or want to do the teaching assistant thing next year, you can count on Mrs. P,” he reassured her.

The group began the long, twisty walk back to their rooms. The elevator was completely overcrowded, so they decided to take the stairs to the fifth floor instead. This proved to be somewhat of a mistake.

“Show of hands, how many of you people actually exercise regularly?” Sal panted. Everyone was breathing hard, but still Tim, Steve (a swimmer), Ankita (dancer) and Imraan (running) raised their hands.

“The rest of you, way to play to the stereotype,” Sal said. “I hate stairs.”

“We could’ve just waited for the next elevator,” Ankita said.

“I warned you about the stairs, bro. I told you dog,” Dominique said, with no expression. Sal’s eyes widened and for a moment Maisie was scared he was actually going to push the girl down. 

“We do not speak of such things in this house!” he said instead.

Dominique shrugged, her poker face finally breaking. “It keeps happening,” she choked out, between giggles. Sal shoved her, but not too hard. Tim rolled his eyes.

Ellen looked at Maisie. “Did you get the joke?” 

Maisie shook her head.  “I think it’s an internet meme thing,” she said.

Eventually, they escaped the stairwell and made it to their rooms. Ankita decided to take a nap, so the other three girls ended up in Sal, Steve, Tim and Tyler’s room, where everyone was either studying or doing homework.

“I don’t want to look at this anymore, so can I check your chem homework when you finish it?” Sal asked the sophomore girls, after several minutes of pretending to study Anatomy. 

“Don’t you also have to study for quiz bowl and Entomology?” asked Steve. “Come on dude. Be a role model.”

“Be a role model or I’ll hide your DS,” Tim added.

“Fiiiine.” Sal pulled out his Entomology flashcards and started flipping through them, listlessly. Maisie checked her chemistry answers one more time and, feeling slightly bad for Sal, passed the page to him.

He glanced at it for half a second. “Yup, these are all right. I overestimated how interesting other people’s chemistry homework is.” He looked at the entomology flashcards again. “Is it 7:30 yet?”

It was 6:15.

They proceeded to study in relative quiet for the next hour, when Dominique grabbed the girls by their shoulders and took them back to their room to get dressed up for the formal dinner.

“Why does it have to be formal?” Maisie complained, pulling on her tights. She was wearing the dress she bought when she went to H and M with the other Science Club officers, with a gold necklace she borrowed from her mother on top of it to make it a little less casual.

“I think by formal they mostly meant no t-shirts and no basketball shorts. Which, as I’m sure you know, is pretty much all science nerd boys wear,” said Dominique, who was pulling and twisting her hair into a complicated braided bun.

“Fair.”

Ellen was wearing her standard outfit of a white blouse and a sky-blue skirt, but she’d clipped her hair back with a shiny silver butterfly-shaped clip. Ankita’s interpretation of formal was more fashionable- narrow black pants, a bright pink blouse, heels and a black cardigan. “I do Model Congress,” she explained, “so I have a lot of business-casual clothes.”

“You are a mystery wrapped in an enigma,” said Dominique. 

There was a knock at the door. “Hi, do any of you know how to tie a tie?” The muffled voice sounded like Tyler. 

“I do!” said Ankita. “But it’s kind of concerning that you guys who have to wear ties for events all the time don’t know how to tie them.” She opened the door. 

“I don’t have to wear ties very often,” Tyler said defensively. “Even Science Club only requires ties like, once or twice a year.”

Ankita stepped back and looked at his outfit critically. “Honestly, you could probably live without a tie for this one,” she said. 

“Perfect. Sal said you guys should be out in the hall in five minutes.” Tyler turned around and went back to his room.

The girls exchanged a look and giggled. “We’re in high school and I’m pretty sure these guys still believe in cooties,” Maisie said, rolling her eyes.

Dominique shook her head. “No, they’re just extremely awkward and don’t know how to talk to girls. Which is very sad, but a different kind of sad.”

“I think he’s skipping prom because he has SATs the next day,” said Ankita. 

“At least he’s saving money,” said Ellen.

They met up with the boys in the hallway and made their way to the dining room, which was an actual fancy hotel dining room.

“Is this what rich people do all the time?” asked Dominique. They were served soup. Not chicken noodle soup, but a choice between pumpkin squash, potato and leek, and tomato basil. Fancy soups.

“My mom’s going to be so proud of me when I tell her I ate vegetables today,” Sal quipped.

“I’m sure once you get to college vegetables will be a thing of the past. My older brother’s always sending me pictures of like, tater tots covered in cheese sauce, and pasta on top of pizza and shit like that,” said Matt. Matt was one of the kids who felt that being part of Science Club was somehow not cool, and thus didn’t talk very much in case it’ll look like he was enjoying himself at nerd club.

They lapsed into silence then, everyone slurping their own respective bowls of soup. They talked about the scavenger hunt a little, about past competitions and what to expect from tomorrow.

“Tomorrow morning everyone has individual events.” Sal explained, between bites of seafood pasta.  “They’ll set up these long tables in the ballroom and everyone will get their own paper test to take and you won’t be allowed to bring a sweater in there or any writing devices in case you somehow sneak an illegal cheat sheet into your fucking pen cap or something like that.”

“Then after that everyone has lunch, and after lunch we’re herded onto buses and transported to the Air and Space Museum. That part’s going to be fucking sick, they rent out the entire museum just for us and we get free food and the opportunity to just run around and do whatever for a few hours. Then Saturday is exactly the same except we do pair events in the morning and go to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History after lunch instead. Wait, no, misspoke, Saturday there’s quiz bowl right after lunch and then museum after that,” Dominique jumped in. She pulled out her copy of the schedule. “Yeah, that’s it,” she said, more to herself than to anyone else. 

“You’ll all be fine,” Steve said, mostly to the sophomores, who were all new to nationals. 

Maisie could feel her pendant grow warm against her chest, and knew that no matter what else happened, she at least would do wonderfully at Astronomy.

Eventually the dinner ended, and they all wandered back to their rooms. “Study hard, but not too hard, because theoretically if you’re here that means you already know your subject pretty well. Don’t stress. No partying hard tonight though, that’s for Saturday night,” Sal instructed them. “Dr. Louis will be checking rooms at 11:30 so everyone be where you’re supposed to be then.”

Everyone ended up crowding into Sal’s room and studying/hanging out there until 11:30 anyway. By 10 o’clock, the studying part had eroded into nothing and someone suggested “Never Have I Ever.”

“Wait, do you say something you have done or haven’t done?” asked Tim.

“Haven’t. And then everyone who has done whatever you said has to clap and put a finger down,” Dominique explained. “I’ll start: never have I ever had sex with a girl.”

“Dominique, there are CHILDREN present!” Sal exclaimed, but he didn’t clap. Maisie and Ellen looked at different parts of the floor. Imraan clapped, but he’d been dating the same girl since eighth grade so it wasn’t even scandalous or surprising. 

Dominique shrugged. “It was the first thing I thought of.”

Steve was next. “Never have I ever been drunk,” he said. Sal, Dominique, Ankita, Rish, Tim, Matt and Imraan all clapped.

“I can see this is the cool kids club after all,” Maisie said dryly.

“It’s not that fun. Stay in school, don’t drink too much shitty alcohol at house parties hosted by people you don’t actually like,” Dominique said.

“Never have I ever kissed anyone,” said Tyler. Dominique, Ankita, Rish, Tim, and Imraan all clapped. 

“Clever, not specifying a gender and getting more people out that way,” Dominique said, scowling slightly. 

Maisie could hear Matt whispering, “what about Stacie, bro?” to Robert, and Robert just shrugging.

“Never have I ever had bubble tea,” Ankita said, grinning. Everyone but Ellen clapped, glaring at her. 

“How have you never had bubble tea, dude? What’s wrong with you? How do you just let your life continue like this?” Tim asked. 

“I don’t like the look of the bubbles, so I just get regular iced tea,” she said, shrugging slightly. “Also, I like winning this game.”

Ellen poked Maisie in the side. “What’s bubble tea and where do you get it?” she whispered.

“It’s a Taiwanese drink that combines flavored iced milk tea with these squishy tapioca pearls, also called boba or bubbles. There’s a bubble tea place on Main Street,” Maisie whispered back. “Hey,” she called out. “We should all go get bubble tea as a team bonding activity when it gets warmer.”

“Good idea, Maze,” said Sal. “I’ll put it on the list.”

Never Have I Ever continued. Dominique got out first, followed by Imraan and Ankita. The game moved fairly slowly and unscandaously until the majority of the club had half of their fingers folded down and Sal smirked and said,

“Never have I ever had a crush on someone in this club, past or present.” 

Dominique smacked his arm and said, “DUDE! NOT COOL!” She glanced at Steve and Maisie, then pounded her fist on the floor. “Motion to strike Sal’s statement from the record!”

“Seconded,” Maisie said quickly. She hated how Steve’s eyes widened when she did so.

“Thirded,” Ellen added, and Maisie whirled around to stare at her. Ellen’s cheeks were burning red. 

“Okay, okay,” Sal said, laughing. Dominique whispered something to him. Maisie couldn’t quite catch it, but she thought it was something like “they have to figure their shit out on their own, you dickhead!” He rolled his eyes, but stopped laughing.

“Okay, never have I ever skipped school for no reason,” Sal said this time.

Tyler raised his hand. “Does the release of a new video game count as a reason?” he asked.

“Yeah. By no reason I was thinking more like just not wanting to go to school. I guess I’m a goody two shoes,” Sal said with a shrug.

Ellen clapped and looked at Maisie, who didn’t. “Haven’t you ever wanted a mental health day?” Ellen asked softly, eyes full of concern.

“And get behind on my work? I don’t have time for that. I can have mental health days on the weekend,” Maisie snapped. She pulled her knees up to her chest and hid her face behind them, feeling oddly defensive for no real reason. She remembered the meltdown she had in middle school Science Competition, and how she learned little tricks to get herself back together after that.  _ Breathe in, breathe out, count to ten.  _ Maisie breathed and counted, and her heartbeat slowed until she felt human again. 

“It’s almost 11:30,” she pointed out. “We should go.”

“Oh, true.” Dominique jumped out and began herding the girls out, like a mother duck leading her ducklings. “Goodnight, boys, she called out.  “I wouldn’t recommend sneaking into other rooms after lights out, not because you’ll get caught but because I’m waking us all up at 7:30 with a REALLY LOUD AND OBNOXIOUS ALARM CLOCK and you don’t want to wake up at 7:30 after going to bed at 1.”

“Everyone should set their alarms for 7:30 anyway, just in case Dominique’s alarm isn’t loud or obnoxious enough for you,” Sal added. “Breakfast starts at 8.”

“Good night,” Maisie said, quietly.

They got back to the girl’s room. “I call first shower,” Dominique said immediately, and was gone. There was an awkward pause.

“I usually shower in the mornings,” said Ankita. She rummaged through her duffle bag and pulled out a t-shirt and a pair of plaid pajama pants, and began changing into them in the corner of the room. Maisie and Ellen immediately turned away.

“I shower in the mornings too,” said Ellen, staring at the floor. 

“I shower at night, so this works out pretty nicely,” said Maisie. She pulled out her shower stuff and sat on her edge of the bed, waiting for Dominique to get out of the shower. 

They were quiet as they all checked their respective phones. Maisie had a missed call from her mom. She picked up.

“Hi, mom,” Maisie said, in Mandarin. “Everything’s fine, we’re in the hotel getting ready for tommorrow. We didn’t really do much today, just the opening ceremony...Uhuh...uhuh...thank you...I miss you too, tell dad good night for me...” she hung up.

She glanced at Ellen for a second. “My mom says good luck to everyone but you specifically.”

Ellen flushed. “Oh. Well. Tell her thank you from me.”

“Will do.” She took her shower. 

Maisie scooted as close to the edge as she could, terrified of what could happen in the middle of the night. She and her subconscious didn’t get along, especially lately. She found herself looking at Ellen too much, smiling at Ellen too much, thinking about her too much, and she wanted it all to stop immediately.

Ellen was also as close to the opposite edge of the bed as possible. Maisie was glad that Ellen, too, seemed determined to Not Make It Weird. Then she wondered why it would be weird, because they were both girls and two girls could be pretty affectionate with each other without it being weird at all. Unless...No. No thinking about things like this until after all the testing and competing and whatever was all OVER. 

They woke up at 7:30 to the Big Bang Theory theme song blasted at top volume. Maisie opened her eyes and saw Ellen staring at her, mortified. They were mere inches apart, curled together like a pair of parentheses, not touching but very close to it. 

Maisie felt her face grow hot.  _ Well, that’s embarrassing,  _ she thought, and jumped up and went into the bathroom to get dressed.

When she’d finished changing, she tapped her pendant, knowing the demon friends were dying to talk to her. Her head was immediately filled with the overwhelming presence of dozens of satanic spirits, all clamoring “Good luck!” and “you’ll do great!” and “you fucking GOT THIS!”

“Thanks guys,” she managed. “Now please begone from whence ye came.”

They left, and Maisie unlocked the bathroom door, feeling a bit like someone had squished her brain in a vise grip for a minute and then let it expand again. 

“Bathroom’s free,” she said.

“Pack whatever you’ll need for the museum in a purse or something. You won’t be able to take it to the testing area, but you won’t have enough time to come back here after the test either, so might as well take it downstairs and leave it at our designated lunch table,” Dominique instructed them as she braided her long, thick hair out of her face. She tied the braid tight, then went next door to play the Big Bang Theory theme song at the boys in case they dared try to sleep in. 

In a matter of minutes, the team was lined up in the hallway. Everyone was instructed to wear Pineborough apparel in some form, whether it be their class t-shirt, science club shirts from previous years, or sports team shirts, just so long as they were all pine-green so the represetatives of New Jersey looked like a singular unit. Even Dr. Louis was wearing a Pineborough Science Club shirt from the previous year. 

“We are so cool,” Sal said, beaming at everyone. They filed into the elevator.

“The California team has matching varsity sweaters,” Dominique whispered to the girls. “They’re going to walk in exactly 2 minutes later than everyone else. Don’t let them intimidate you, because they suck.”

“Thanks, mom,” Ellen said, rolling her eyes good-naturedly. 

“How dare you. I am not a mom, I am the cool older sister. Or, alternatively, the hip aunt.”

They found their table set up in the sort of hallway-like open space outside the testing room. There were nametags and ID codes at each chair. Everyone ignored the nametags and sat down where they felt like sitting and then passed the cards around until everyone was matched up properly. 

The breakfast served was a standard fancy hotel breakfast buffet, more impressive than what they got at states and regionals, but still far from amazing. There were scrambled eggs and sausage and tater tots in addition to the standard bagels and fruit and pastry things. And fresh-squeezed orange-strawberry juice in a glass pitcher, impressively labeled with a printed card. 

Tim built a mountain of tater tots on his plate, drizzled them with ketchup, and went back to the table. Maisie side-eyed this display.

“I like tater tots,” he said simply.

“At least get an apple or something,” she insisted. “Vitamins. Minerals. Not passing out in the middle of a test.”

“Dude, I’m an athlete. I know what I need to eat to do well,” Tim said, rolling his eyes. “Chill.”

“Fair,” Maisie replied. She went back to eating her food. The table was subdued, everyone still shaking off sleep and worrying about what was to come. Ankita was snapchatting with her friends in study hall, back home in New Jersey. Ellen was texting.

“Did you know there’s a pretty high chance there are insect parts in that sausage you’re eating?” Sal asked, sitting down with a full plate. “That is not actually on the entomology test, but it is bug related, so I know about it. Actually, I think I read it in a Cracked article once.”

Maisie looked at her half-eaten sausage again, and carefully pushed it to the edge of her plate. She pulled out her phone and found her friend group chat. “Wish me luck today guys,” she typed. Her fingers were shaking, despite everything, and she hated herself for it.

The chat flooded with supportive stickers and emojis, and they did make her feel better a little.

_ Breathe in, breathe out, count to ten, you know everything. You can do this.  _

They finished eating, and waited for the testing room to open. Maisie pulled up her digital astronomy flashcards on her phone and flipped through them one last time. She had them all memorized at this point, but they could always be more memorized. Just the act of rereading the familiar words calmed and centered her, reminding her that this was just another test like dozens of tests she’d faced before.

Ellen tapped her on the shoulder. “Nervous?” she whispered.

Maisie shook her head. “I’m fine. Are you?”

“I’m not doing an event today, remember? I get to wish you guys luck and then go back to the room. I could watch TV, do my homework, maybe wander around the city, who knows? I have no obligations until lunch and it’s great.” Ellen grinned.

“I hate you,” Maisie grumbled, and Ellen beamed even more brightly in response.

“No you don’t,” she said, in a bright, happy, airy voice. And Maisie had to smile at her certainty. Because it was true, she didn’t hate Ellen, not even a little bit. 

Ellen, Matt and Robert had no events this morning, so they wished their teammates luck (and in Ellen’s case, hugged everyone) and went off. 

“We’ve got 3 hours,” said Matt, looking at Google maps. “We could just walk to the National mall and take pictures in front of the Lincoln Memorial. We’re actually really close to it. I think the only reason they’re making us take buses to the Air and Space museum is to make sure we all stay together.”

“That’d be kind of a dick move, to go and take pictures without the entire group,” said Robert.

“Well, I don’t really want to just sit around and wait for them to do their thing,” Matt said. “Or do homework. I really do not want to do homework.”

Ellen thought about the forty precalc problems she had to finish by Monday, and made a face in spite of herself. “We could just go to the National Mall and wander around, we don’t have to take obnoxious pictures. Too bad Wilson won’t give me extra credit if I write about it.”

“Works for me,” said Robert. “Dr. Louis, do you want to come?”

“Alright,” she said.

So they all went and wandered around the mall together. They did take a few pictures, but they were very funny pictures and deserved to be taken. Ellen learned that Matt and Robert were doing one of the building events together, that Robert could solve a rubik’s cube in under 30 seconds, and that the two of them had been best friends since kindergarten. “Love you bro, no homo,” Robert said punching Matt’s shoulder gently. Matt smiled softly and punched him back. “I love you too bro, no homo.”

Ellen rolled her eyes and thought about how much easier it was to be a girl and not have to declare whether or not your actions were supposed to be gay. She wondered what Maisie would say if she told her, but then immediately redirected her thoughts off of that road. No thinking about telling Maisie until this entire testing competition trial disaster is over and done with. Imagine screwing up their Write it Do it dynamic because of her own selfishness! 

Ellen threw a penny into the reflecting pool with slightly more force than necessary and watched the ripples vanish into infinity. She remembered the infinity of the cloudless star-filled sky, in a nameless desert, and wondered if Maisie was thinking about that sky too.

They wandered back to their hotel right as the tests were scheduled to finish up. “They probably started a little late as usual, so we don’t need to rush,” said Dr. Louis. Sure enough, when they returned to their table the door of the testing room was still closed, and the lunch buffet was just being set up.

“I guess the four-course dinner was just a one-time thing,” said Matt, eyeing the pasta and salad options.

“They have to feed 500 teenagers, most of which had just spent several hours taking a very stressful test. This just makes sense,” said Ellen. 

The door opened, and a flood of students poured out. The New Jersey team was right in the middle of the crush, and it was only after the dust settled and everyone was more or less lined up in front of the buffet table that the three team members who weren’t competing today found the rest of their group.

“How was it?” Ellen asked Maisie.

Maisie made a thoughtful face. “Could’ve been worse,” she said. “Could’ve been a lot worse. They gave us all NSC branded pens and pencils and clipboards though, look. Color-coded by event even.”

Ellen whistled. “Dang, nice. We went to the National Mall and just wandered around for a bit. It was pretty chill.”

“The kid next to me was from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and it reminded me of High School Musical again. What team?”

“WILDCATS! Getcha head in the game!” Chanted everyone within earshot. It was truly beautiful how universal the knowledge and appreciation of this classic teenage film was.

Maisie rolled her eyes.

They sat and ate and talked about the tests. 

“Entomology was fucking brutal. It’s like if the States test was regular level, this test was AP level. Scientific names of insects are crawling out of my eyeballs. I think I’ve developed a phobia.” Sal pulled his phone out and started texting rapidly. “The bugs have taken me prisoner and the math club co-president needs me to walk her through How to Fundraise for shit, over text, right now immediately. FUCK OFF, STEPHANIE,” he yelled at the screen.

“Stephanie Kim? She’s...persistent. Hey, maybe you can take her to prom,” Steve suggested. 

“What, because she’s a girl that talks to me she’s automatically a potential prom date? I’d sooner take her to the depths of hell. That’ll teach her to text me seven times after I tell her I am fucking busy, and in another fucking state. God.” Stephanie was a pleasant if overzealous senior girl who was very passionate about math and math club. She was probably the only reason the math club even had any members, because of her incessant advertising, promoting and event-organizing. She probably did not deserve the full extent of Sal’s wrath. 

Maisie looked at Dominique. “Does he get like this a lot?”

Dominique waved a hand dismissively and took a sip of her soda. “It’s the post-competition adrenaline. He’s always overemotional right after a big thing. Poor Steph just happened to get on his bad side at the wrong moment.”

Sal slammed his phone down on the table and wordlessly slid it over to Dominique, who put it in her pocket to be returned at a later time.

“Speaking of prom dates, though,” he said, his face changing from “unfathomably irritated” to “blindingly cheerful” in the blink of an eye, “Imraan, are you planning a fun promposal for your girl?”

“We’ve been dating for four years. I don’t think it’s really necessary,” he said pushing the noodles around on his plate.

“Did you ask her if she wanted one, though? Because I know a lot of girls secretly want one. My boyfriend just asked me and then like a week later I was like so are you going to do a big public promposal and he was like ‘I didn’t realize you were that kind of girl!’ But then he did it and it was really cute. The video’s still on youtube, I think!” Dominique tapped at her phone for a bit, then said “Got it!” and pushed the phone to the middle of the table.

Alex danced to some K-pop song in the middle of the lunchroom during lunch, in front of everyone in the entire school, (“my favorite song! He asked my friends and everything!” Dominique said) and then presented her with a box of donuts that spelled out “prom?”, AND a bouquet of flowers (“blue gerbera daisies, also my favorite!”) 

Dominique smiled at the video fondly. “He really does care about me a lot. Not even the distance of college has changed that. I am so lucky.”

“I am not showing my girlfriend that video, because I really can’t dance,” Imraan said, flushing. “But I’ll ask if she wants a promposal.”

“What about you guys?” Sal asked, looking around at the other juniors.

Ankita lowered her eyes modestly and said, “Kyle Greenberg asked me already. Nothing fancy,  though.”

“The lacrosse guy?” Maisie asked. Steve and Tyler exchanged a glance.

“He shoved me into a locker once in middle school. I didn’t realize people actually did that in real life, but apparently yeah, it happens in real life and it happened to me,” Tyler said hesistantly. “I’m sure he’s learned, though! And is probably a perfectly upstanding young gentleman.”

“He never did anything to me specifically, but he was such a dick to my friend David, so we don’t really get along,” Steve said, after a pause.

Ankita twisted her mouth up. “Well. He’s always been perfectly kind to me, but that’s not cool at all. I’ll have to talk to him about it.” She pulled out her phone and started tapping at it, her movements measured, carefully controlled.

“SO....... Who’s excited for the Air and Space museum?” Ellen asked. The awkward change of topic was welcomed, and soon everyone was chatting about their experiences with the museum, how much they love Air and Space, hey remember that field trip to the Franklin Institute in 5th grade, etcetera.

“When went to the Liberty Science Museum with the science club in 7th grade, Steve went on that girder walking thing like 50 feet up in the air, but he took two steps and just froze. Couldn’t move at all,” Sal began. Steve shrugged sheepishly and nodded, like, yes, that happened.

“Then our coach at the time, Mrs. Mathison, had to go and talk him back to the platform. And then when he got back down, he said-” “I didn’t realize I’d actually have to walk all the way along that girder by myself,” Steve finished, blushing. “I don’t know what I expected, but at least I discovered my fear of heights relatively early in life.”

Maisie was in 6th grade when all of that happened, and she wasn’t involved in science club then. She tried to remember if she knew any of her teammates in middle school, but middle school for her was a dark haze of demons and chalk circles on the floor of her room. She didn’t think she talked much to other science people even when she was on the team. Her world revolved around different things.

Eventually lunch ended, and the children were herded onto buses for the 10-minute ride to the Air and Space museum, since apparently hyperintelligent high school students could not be trusted to walk three blocks without wandering off. The buses were smaller and with wider seats than normal school buses, which was strange. The Pineborough girls all squeezed together into a seat.

Ankita stabbed at her phone a few times, then let out a frustrated sigh. “Well! I guess I don’t have a prom date anymore,” she said. She pulled her feet up and peeked over the top of her seat. “Hey, Tyler? Want to go to prom with me? Kyle’s a little shit.”  
Tyler looked like someone had hit him with a truck. “Uh,” he said, eloquently.

“You have until the end of this trip to think about it, it’s cool. I’ll pay for your ticket since I asked you. I’m just...” she looked at her phone again and pressed the screenshot buttons. “Fucking  _ pissed.  _ What a jerk! How could he... never mind.” Ankita sank back down and scrunched herself closer to the window.

The rest of the girls exchanged a look, but didn’t press. The bus pulled into the parking lot outside of the Air and Space museum without any other particularly interesting incidents.

Dr. Louis gathered the Pineborough team around herself and handed out maps of the museum for everyone. “There’ll be snack carts here, here, and here, so feel free to help yourself,” she pointed. “We’ll have to be back on the bus at 5, and then we can go out for dinner after that whenever. Or eat the leftover pizza from yesterday, that’s also an option. Anyway, that’s all I’ve got, go nuts.”

Everyone cheered, and the team split up.

“Let’s check out the flight simulator,” Maisie said immediately, and dragged Ellen in a direction she vaguely remembered from the last time she was here, years and years ago. “I remember it was really fun when I was ten years old, so obviously it will continue to be really cool to this day.”

There was already a line at the simulator when they got there, though. Maisie spotted Elizabeth the Arizona Girl up in front and introduced her to Ellen, making amiable small talk while the line inched forward. 

“Did you take a test today?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yeah, Astronomy. You?”  
“Rocks and minerals, and I’m doing quiz bowl tomorrow. How about you?” She asked Ellen. 

Ellen shifted slightly. “I’m doing write it do it with Maisie tomorrow, and I’m an alternate for quiz bowl.”

“Cool. Write it do it always seemed super hard to me, I’m mad impressed with anyone who can actually do it well.” Elizabeth’s turn for the simulator came up, and she smiled and waved goodbye as she climbed into the machine.

The simulator could be experienced solo or in pairs. 

“Do you want to do it alone or with me?” Maisie asked Ellen, as they got near the front.

Ellen looked at her, blushing slightly. “With you, of course. Team bonding exercise and all that.”

They did the simulator together, flying, spinning upside down, shooting at imaginary targets. They scored 5 points. The high score was 15 for the day, but the simulator’s screen called them aces and they couldn’t help but feel slightly proud of that.

When they got out of the simulator, feeling slightly seasick from all of the spinning, Ellen pulled out her museum map.

“I want to go to the planetarium,” Maisie said, before Ellen could say anything. 

“That’s cool. I want to see the World War I exhibit across from it. You do your thing and I’ll do my thing.” They walked up the stairs together and split up.

Maisie saw a line outside the planetarium, and a sign on the door that said the next show was starting in ten minutes. She got in the line and leaned casually against the railing, looking down to the suspended planes on the floor below.

“Maisie.”

She turned around. “Oh. Hey, Steve. Here to see the planetarium show too?”

He took a deep breath and said, “Actually, I was hoping I could talk to you.”

Maisie blanched.  _ Oh shit, it’s actually happening.  _

“Do you...Would you, uh, want to go to prom with me?”

Maisie gripped the railing tightly, as if she was going to fall off any moment now. The floor seemed so far away all of a sudden. “As friends, right?” she asked, desperately. “Because like, I’m sorry, but I like someone else right now, so.”

“Oh. Who?” He seemed to be taking it well.

Maisie looked back at the planetarium, hoping for the doors to open and for an escape from this uncomfortable conversation. “Uh. I’d rather not talk about it, if that’s okay.”

Steve just nodded, and pushed his glasses further up his nose. “That’s fair. I’d be honored to go to prom with you as friends, because you’re a great person and a great friend.”

Maisie reddened slightly. “Stop.”

Steve just smiled. “It’s true. Well, I’m actually not that interested in the planetarium exhibit, so I’ll see you later, yeah?” 

Maisie smiled a little. “Yeah,” she said. Everything really did go better than expected.

When she and Ellen met up again, in the exhibition gallery of hot-air balloons and zeppelins, Maisie casually blurted out “Steve asked me to prom just now.”

Ellen froze. “Did you say yes?” she asked, voice unusually high, sounding like a stretched-out piece of thread.

“Yeah, but only as friends, so it’s not a big deal. He’s a good guy.”

Ellen let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “So do you like someone else or something?” she asked.

Maisie carefully kept her eyes fixed on the hot air balloon in front of her, reading the descriptive plaque over and over again. “Maybe,” she said, after a few excruciatingly long seconds. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“How do you maybe have feelings for someone? You either do or you don’t,” Ellen insisted, voice still too high.

“I said I don’t really want to talk about it!” Maisie snapped. Something in her face changed. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know,” she said again, quieter this time.

She went to the other side of the room. Ellen didn’t follow her.

After the museum, it was discovered that the starving teenage boys with bottomless pits for stomachs had finished the leftover pizza around midnight the night before, so they were left with no choice but to go out for dinner. 

“What’s everyone’s budget? We might just go to Burger King or something to save money,” Dominique, the treasurer, suggested, gazing at her Google Maps app.

“Suggestion: walk down the street and pick anywhere with a Zagat rating on the door,” Ankita said.

“What’s a Zagat rating?” asked Maisie. They started walking down the street.

“It’s a little sign on the door that says if a restaurant is good, basically, and the higher the number the better. But being rated at all is better than not being worthy of a rating. My older sister taught me this, she’s a foodie. She has a blog about the best places to eat in her college town and everything.”

“Does anyone else have any opinions on the dinner thing?” Sal asked the group. “Budgets? Actually if someone’s short of money I had a job last summer so I’ll cover it. It’s my duty as president. Let’s do Ankita’s thing.”

They stopped at a glassy, modern-looking Banh Mi place with a square maroon Zagat sticker on the door.

“Everyone good with banh mi?” Sal asked.

Most of the group nodded, but Ellen raised her hand timidly. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Vietnamese sandwiches. Interestingly flavored meat, carrots, cilantro, cucumber I think, jalapeno peppers sometimes, all on French baguette bread, because Colonialism.  They’re popular in Philly,” Dominique explained. She looked at the menu on the door. “This place also sells noodle soup if you’re not up for the sandwich. And there’s vegetarian options!”

Ellen looked around the group and took a deep breath to steady herself. “Sounds interesting,” she said firmly. “Let’s try it.”

“Dr. Louis, your thoughts?”

Dr. Louis shrugged. “Sure.”

So they went to the Banh Mi place. Dominique and Tim put a lot of sririacha sauce on everything they ordered. Sal put a little sriracha. Steve defended his low spice tolerance by saying his family was from Beijing and not Sichuan. 

“We’re not from Sichuan either but I can still handle spice,” Tim shot back, and Steve just glared.

“I just don’t like sriracha,” Maisie said, sipping her medium-spice pho broth. “It’s overused.”

Ellen ate her medium-spice pork sandwich slowly, savoring the flavor. “We eat a lot of spicy food in the south, but like, it’s a different kind of spice. More black pepper. Harsher.”

She looked a little sad at that.

“Hey, Sal, when do you hear back from MIT?” asked Robert.

Sal looked at his watch. “Pi day, at 1:59 in the afternoon exactly, because they’re a nerd school for nerds. So, next week. I am definitely not freaking out at all.”

“What about the Ivies?”

“April first, all of them, the bastards,” Sal said. “Stanford’s like, end of March I think. I want to know now, though, it’s the waiting that’s painful. Dominique, you’re so lucky having everything already figured out.”

Dominique chuckled softly. “Just because I know where I’m going doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing. I still haven’t figured out a major. I keep going back and forth between biochem and like, mechanical engineering, which is weird but I know like what kind of thought process and workflow I am all about, but not what specific field I want to focus on.”

“Yeah, but you have so much time to decide all that!” Sal protested. “I could get rejected from literally everywhere and have to go to...” he suppressed a shudder, “ _ Rutgers.” _

“Hey, my brother goes to Rutgers!” Matt protested. “It’s an excellent school.”

“I know, but the prestige, my guy! My parents won’t have anything to brag about if I don’t go to a top-tier school to cancel out my sister’s art school education.”

“Wait, didn’t you get into Princeton?” Ellen asked. “Why are you worrying about going to Rutgers?”

Sal looked to the side. “Money...I don’t know how much financial aid Princeton will give me, and Rutgers is offering a full ride. So. I’ll still need to wait until April to get all the financial aid and scholarship awards from everywhere and then use those to make my decision...” he put his head in his hands, the invincible Science Club President looking for once overwhelmed and uncertain.

“Focus on the present, dude. You have quiz bowl and anatomy tomorrow and you have to do your best on both of those, and you can’t do that if you’re worrying about something you can’t even affect at this point,” Steve pointed out sensibly.

“Yeah, yeah. You’re right.” Sal shook his head and smiled, and it was like the world had snapped right back to normal.

They ate their food and chatted amiably about their events for the next day.

“Do you want to practice for write it do it after we get back?” Maisie asked Ellen.

“Did we bring any materials for it?”

Maisie’s smile fell. “Oh. No, I don’t think we did.”

“We can obsessively go over all our previous attempts and analyze where we went wrong?” Ellen suggested.

“That is a rabbit hole of anxiety you two do not need to go down,” Sal interjected from the other side of the table. “Just trust that you have practiced for this and can do it blindfolded, and you’ll be fine.”

Maisie’s phone buzzed, and she checked it. It was a text from Steve. 

Steve: can i tell the team i asked you to prom?

Maisie looked over at him and nodded. He flashed her a relieved smile and then, in the next lull of conversation, blurted out, “I asked Maisie to prom and she said yes but as friends so yeah.” The table exploded.

“Yoooooo congrats you guys!”

“Nice one!”  
“Have fun!” 

“Yeah.” Maisie felt a tiny twinge of regret, at this point, because she highly doubted anyone but Ellen and Dominique would believe that she hadn’t been secretly head over heels in love with Steve Lin for years on end. Maybe she was overthinking it.

Ankita poked Tyler with the end of her spoon. “So, did you think about it?”

Tyler had that deer-in-the-headlights look on his face again. “Uh.”

“If you were planning on asking someone else or something that’s cool too, it was just an idea,” Ankita said, smiling reassuringly.

“I wasn’t planning on going to prom at all,” he said, looking at his plate. “Because SATs.”

“You can get permission to leave early if you have to take the SATs the next day,” Ankita said. “A few of my friends are doing that.”

Tyler looked up at the celing for an excruciatingly long couple of seconds. “Sure,” he said eventually. “Why not.”

“Awesome!” Ankita looked at her phone and started texting rapidly. “And convenient, since tickets go on sale like the day after we get back from this.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey guys,” Ankita yelled, “Tyler’s going to prom with me instead of That Jerk Kyle.”

“Nice!” everyone yelled back.

“An interesting form of revenge,” said Dominique. “I approve.”

“It’s not entirely revenge,” Ankita argued. But the decision was made, and so, having eaten and gossiped their fill, the Pineborough Science Team headed back to their hotel room for the night.

Maisie showered and changed into her pajamas the moment they were through the door. She pulled out her book for English class and settled in to read it.

“Dude, it’s like, barely 8:30, and wake-up time tomorrow is 7:30. You can’t seriously tell me you’re trying to get eleven entire hours of sleep,” said Dominique. “You sure you don’t want to go to the boy’s room with us? We’re playing Mafia.”

Maisie shook her head. “I need to like, not talk to people for a bit. I might join you guys after I finish these chapters.”

“Suit yourself.”

Maisie read fast, but this time she found herself reading the same paragraph over and over again. She wondered if it’d be weird hanging out with everyone now that she was Going To Prom with Steve, and she wondered what tomorrow was going to be like, and her brain was filled with swirling overwhelming thoughts that, for once, were just her own and not those of the demons that liked to occupy it so much.

Now that was a thought. Maisie looked around to make sure she was alone in the room and touched her pendant.

“Something wrong?” Stolas answered, this time. Maisie was grateful.

“I don’t know, I think I’m just freaking out over nothing right now. Everything’s changing and there’s that big test tomorrow and the Trial like right after and I hate not knowing everything for certain.” Maisie flopped back on the huge soft hotel bed. 

“You’re doing fine,” Stolas said. “And you don’t have to deal with your social problems right away, and definitely not now.”

“I wanted to go play Mafia with everyone, but I’m worried it’ll be awkward and weird since I said yes to prom with Steve. Even though I specified ‘as friends!’ But it probably would’ve been even worse if I’d said no...” Maisie stared at the cracks in the ceiling and wished they’d spell out a clear and reasonable solution to all her problems.

She heard Stolas chuckling good-naturedly. “Well, I am not the most familiar with human social norms, but I feel like if you want to go play Mafia with your friends, you should play Mafia with your friends, and that it will be as fun as you want it to be.”

“Thanks, Stolas. That wasn’t very helpful but I appreciate it anyway.” Maisie cut the connection and lay there for a few minutes, processing. Then, she pulled on a sweatshirt (the boys kept the air conditioning on full blast in their room for some reason) shoved her phone in one pocket and key card in the other, and went next door. 

The next morning Dominique’s patented Irritating Wake-Up Call was the Narwhals song.

“Are we in 2011? Did ah go back in tahme? Ah didn’t ask for this?” Ellen grumbled, accent thick and yawning. Maisie thought the music sounded vaguely familar, but didn’t remember where she knew it from. 

“Narwhals, narwhals, pretty big and pretty wide, they’ll beat a polar bear in a fight,” Dominique sang cheerfully as she applied her mascara. “This is, like High School Musical and the stairs meme, a timeless goddamned classic. I’m going to go wake the boys up, they deserve it.”

At breakfast that day, Maisie put cream cheese on her bagel while the fucking narwhals kept singing in her head.

“Have you seen the video, though?” Dominique asked when she complained. “It’s a work of art.” 

They watched the video. Maisie had to concede it was a work of art. Then Sal sat down and complained the narwhal song was stuck in his head, too, so they watched it again to get it out of his head. “I read somewhere that the only cure for music getting stuck in a head is to listen to the whole thing from start to finish again,” Dominique explained.

Twenty minutes later, when they were all splitting up to go to their pair events, Sal put his hands to his temples and muttered, “ _ it didn’t fucking work.” _

“Do you want to borrow my headphones and replace it with a different song?” Maisie offered.

“Fuck no. I’ll just. Kick ass and take names while narwhals swim in the ocean of my brain,” he replied, shaking his head irritably as if that’ll get them out. 

Write it Do it was set up in one of the smaller conference rooms at their hotel. The tables and chairs were all moved out to give the teams space. The Doers were herded into the adjacent room to wait for their Writers to write their things, and everyone was talking cheerfully. The competition was almost over, they were going to another fun museum today, tomorrow they had the awards ceremony, everything was coming up National Science Competition Contestants. It was a good time to meet and talk to students from other states you’ll never see again.

“We practiced a lot with Lincoln Logs because I’ve had a big set of those since I was little and knew how to use them, but then at a scrimmage with the other high school in my district they used K’Nex and Sadie and I were like, what the fuck, so we went out and bought so many random materials so we’d be prepared for anything,” said a kid from Wisconsin.

“I built the Statue of Liberty out of butter once on a dare,” said a girl named Caroline from Utah. 

The room regarded Caroline from Utah solemnly.

“Nice,” someone said eventually. 

By the time the writers were ushered out and the doers ushered in, the doers felt they had all become, if not friends, then compatriots. Buddies.

Write it Do it on the national level was distinguished from states by the fact that each set of instructions was typed up and not handwritten, and that these typed instructions were printed out and distributed to the doers with their materials when they walked into the room. The floor was divided into a masking tape grid, each square marked with a specific state. Maisie found New Jersey near the center of the room and sat down in it, and got to work.

“How’d it go?” Ellen asked when she emerged, almost half an hour later.

“Probably fine, I don’t know,” Maisie said. She felt dazed after focusing so hard on one thing.

Ellen squeezed her arm reassuringly and pulled her off to lunch. 

“How was Anatomy?” Ellen asked Sal and Steve when they got to the table. The two of them made identically pained faces. Anatomy was simply a paper test taken by two people working together instead of one, but it was still as annoying and as much of a pain as any other event. 

“Not good,” said Sal.

“Not good at all,” added Steve. “How was Write it Do it?”  
Ellen and Maisie looked at each other, then looked back at those two. “Okay,” they said in unison. “Not bad,” Maisie clarified. “Not amazing, but not bad.”

Dominique and Tyler returned from their pair event, Geology, looking pleased with themselves. “Finally, someone with high self-esteem!” Maisie joked. “How’d it go?”

“Well,” Dominique stated, setting her plate down on the table with a thump. “Just dandy.”

“The questions seemed pretty easy for the most part,” said Tyler. “It was okay.” 

One by one, the other team members all gravitated towards the table and reported on their own performances. Building went “okay.” Disease Detectives was “chill.” Everyone was avoiding saying anything too positive just in case they jinxed themselves by saying they felt good about something when they actually bombed it. 

“So! Museum of Natural History today!” said Sal. “Who’s excited?”

Ellen smiled, but everyone else made faces and said “eh.” 

“They don’t have a big blue whale so who cares,” said Maisie flatly.

“Hope Diamond, though,” Robert pointed out, and a few people nodded solemnly.

“Blue whale?” Ellen asked.

“All of us have spent a lot of time at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, the one they made those movies about, so we have grown jaded to natural museums as a genre. Big blue whale or bust!” said Dominique. “Although, I looked it up and the Smithsonian one has a model of a 45-foot North Atlantic Right Whale hanging in their Ocean Hall, but in the photos it doesn’t look nearly as impressive as the one in New York.”

Ellen looked up at the ceiling. “I still haven’t been to New York City, except for the airport. We just never have time.”

Sal pulled out his phone and started typing a reminder. “Team excursion idea number 38, Museum of Natural History, New York. We could also go to Central Park and that place with the fancy milkshakes and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.... You can’t live a train ride away from New York and not go to New York!”

“I’m in the Columbia Weekend Program for high school students,” said Imraan. “I take classes at Columbia University every Saturday. I literally go to New York once a week, every week, for the last two years, and you’ve never been even once? This is just such a bizarre concept to me.”

“We were going to go over Thanksgiving weekend to see the decorations, but my mom got sick,” said Ellen, feeling defensive. “I’m sure it’s not as cool as in the movies, anyway.”

Everyone laughed. “Yeah, the subway smells weird and is hard to navigate and there’s a lot of trash in the streets. But it’s still fun to visit, somehow. It’s one of those places that has everything,” said Sal.

Before the Natural History Museum trip, they had quiz bowl. And they were ready. 

Quiz bowl at the national level was done in brackets, with teams getting eliminated until the final was between just three states. This was done on the very sensible idea that fifty teams trying to answer a question first would be largely down to chance over skill. 

So, New Jersey faced off against New Mexico, Nebraska and New Hampshire. And won. Sal switched in Ellen for Steve and they went to the next round, against Oklahoma. And won again. They made it, in fact, all the way to the semifinals, where they were edged out with a margin of just one single point by Ohio.

“It’s no one’s fault,” Dominique said, embracing everyone as they walked off the stage, heads down. “You all answered what you could. Maybe you could’ve buzzed in faster, but that’s just luck. You all did really well, and we did not make it even close to the finals last year, so I think all of you should be really proud of yourselves for coming this far.”

“Thanks, mom,” Maisie said, a little more sharply than she intended.

“I am not your mom, I am your cool older sister and/or your hip aunt. We’ve been over this,” Dominique flashed her a smile. The New Jersey team found their assigned seats in the audience, and watched Ohio, California and Texas face off for the title of quiz bowl champions.

“They only do well because there’s so many of them. In California and Texas they don’t just have Regionals and States, they have Districts, and Cities for places like Houston and Austin, and Invitationals, and all these other competitions in between. And States are like Nationals for them, like they have to get a hotel and stay for multiple days. Because they’re huge.” Sal glared a little at the California team and their matching varsity sweaters.

“What about Ohio?” asked Maisie.

“An anomaly,” he answered simply. “Nah but seriously they’re pretty meh in all other academic competitions but they go really hard for NSC and no one really knows why? It’s just how it is. Whatever.”

California won. No one was particularly surprised. “It’s the sweaters. The sweaters give them power,” hissed Dominique, and everyone snickered.

The announcer picked up the mic and said, “without further ado, let us proceed to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History!”

This time, they walked. “Maybe they ran out of money for buses,” Tim suggested. It wasn’t a big deal, though. The weather was unusually warm for mid-March, and it was sunny and pleasant outside. Unfortunately, it being a Saturday afternoon, it seemed a lot of other people had similar ideas, so the sidewalks were fairly crowded. The NSC volunteers had to wave signs in the air to keep everyone headed in the right direction.

“What’s everyone’s plan of action?” Sal asked, when they got to the museum and were given maps. 

“Gems and minerals,” Tim said immediately. “I need to see what I got wrong on the test. Also, the Hope diamond would be pretty cool.”

“Living coral reef!” said Ellen. 

Maisie shrugged. “I don’t really care.” Ellen looked at her and widened her eyes a little. “The coral reef might be cool. And we can make fun of their less-impressive whale.”

“Okay, let’s meet back here at 6?” Everyone nodded, and the team scattered around the museum.

“The New York Whale is literally twice as big as this, and hanging from the ceiling. This is sad, truly,” Maisie said, taking a dozen cellphone pictures of the whale model named Phoenix anyway.

“Shut up about the whale and check out this jellyfish!” Ellen exclaimed. “Look at it! Look how big and floaty it is. It’s like, twenty feet long.” The jellyfish was suspended in the air, pink and undulating and surrounded by glass barriers on all four sides. Maisie imagined what it would be like to stand right under it, like an umbrella that doubled as a rainstorm. 

“It’s nice,” she said indifferently, smiling at Ellen’s indignant expression. “I’m kidding, this is actually pretty cool.”

They ran around the hall, reading out fun facts from the information plaques, and then went to the Gems and Minerals exhibit to look at all the pretty jewels.

“Stolas taught me about rocks and gems and minerals and stuff when I was younger. I really liked rocks and minerals. I still know a lot of stuff about them. But I guess I was better at Astronomy. Especially now that I’ve focused on Astronomy all year. If Tim hadn’t outscored me at Rocks and Minerals in tryouts...” Maisie trailed off and focused on the diamond again, looking into the quiet blue fire burning in its core. 45.52 Carats, a tiny voice whispered in her head. Originally purchased as the Tavernier Blue. Recut and sold to French royalty, then London bankers, then American socialites.... The timeline ran through her head and circled in a loop.

“Stolas is the owl one, right?” Ellen asked softly. 

“Yeah. He doesn’t like people much. But he was a good teacher. Really calm and patient.”

They were silent for a moment.

“Come on, let’s go look at the other stuff. The Ametrines are so pretty,” Ellen said. Maisie snorted, wishing she could just look at these colorful rocks and think “pretty” instead of having their histories and properties and various assorted fun facts just swim up unbidden in her memory. 

“Pretty,” she had to agree. The bands of yellow and pinkish-purple combined to create gems that glowed from the inside out, sparkling completely unlike the diamond they just saw, but beautiful, powerful, haunting nonetheless. 

They ran into Matt and Robert and nodded at them, but didn’t talk. Around 5:30, Ellen said, “do you want to go to the gift shop?” and Maisie shrugged.

“All museum gift shops are the same,” Maisie said, looking around at the souvenir stuffed animals and the pick-your-own-rocks thing.

“I think I’ll get a magnet for our fridge,” said Ellen, ignoring her completely. 

Maisie resisted for a moment, then caved and bought a keychain. Just one, though.

She waited until Ellen bought her magnet. “Let’s go meet everyone else,” she said, and they rejoined the team in the lobby, swinging their gift shop bags.

“Aw, look at you tourists,” Steve teased, but not meanly. “We need to figure out where to go for dinner, again.”

“How about we just get something from the food truck outside the museum? It looks pretty good, they have like, sandwiches and stuff. Vegetarian options,” Dominique suggested.

“When’d you have time to check out the food truck?” Ellen asked.

Dominique shrugged. “I walk fast.”

“Dr. L? All in favor?” Everyone was in favor, so to the food truck they went. Dominique turned out to have skimmed the menu and missed the fact that the food truck’s specialty was fancy poutine, which was French-Canadian curds and gravy over fries. They did have sandwiches also, but the poutine was the selling point. 

“Oh man, I had poutine in Montreal a few years ago, it was so good,” Ankita gushed. She turned to the vendor. “Is your gravy vegetable-based? Do you have veggie options?”

“We have a vegetable-based gravy option, yes, and also a vegetable nacho poutine. So that’s one vegetable poutine?” 

Ankita nodded. They ordered several traditional poutines, a veggie traditonal one, a vegetable nacho one, a bacon cheeseburger one, and a korean one, because they sounded interesting.

“Here in Science Club everything belongs to the collective,” Sal intoned. “By which I mean I’m going to steal fries from all of you because these all sound really good.”

Everyone laughed and shared fries and passed their dinky cardboard containers around as they walked around the big reflecting pool in the National Mall, eventually sitting down on and around a bench to watch the sunset. Sal gave Dr. Louis his phone to take photos, because it was very cute.

“I know testing is over, but don’t forget we still have the awards ceremony tomorrow, so I’m still checking rooms at 11:30 tonight.”

Everyone nodded obligingly, and then checked their phones. Sal messaged the group chat with “meet outside our room at 12 and we’re going to a 24-hr food place like Taco Bell or something to celebrate”

“Ok but isn’t it kinda sketch to be wandering outside an unfamiliar city late at night” Imraan responded.

“Don’t u do sports u can beat up anyone” Sal shot back.

“This is a REAL CITY ppl carry guns n shit here”

They looked up from their screens and glared at each other. Maisie felt slightly guilty at having this entire secret conversation about breaking Dr. Louis’s rules right in front of her.

As previously mentioned, it was an unusually warm and sunny March day, and people were taking advantage of it. Maisie could see familiar kids, some other state’s team, walking towards the Lincoln memorial. Tourists were walking along the reflecting pool, skipping stones and dropping in coins. Maisie remembered her mother explaining to her once that you throw coins into fountains and bodies of water when you want to come back to them again. And at that moment, she wished she had spare change on her.

“This is nice,” Ellen said, leaning into Maisie on the bench. Maisie froze.

“Cute,” Dominique said, glancing at them for a fraction of a second. “Anyway, let’s go take pictures in front of Abe Lincoln, like tourists.”

“Are we not tourists?” Ellen asked.

“We are, but we don’t want to look like it.”

“Did any of you guys have Wilson for American History?” Maisie asked, when they climbed up the steps. “Would he give us extra credit for this?”

“I had him and no, no he would not,” said Tyler. “Sorry to disappoint.”

“Dang,” Ellen said. They took some pictures and posted them to the Pineborough Science Club Facebook Page. By then, the sun had set completely, and the streets of Washington D. C were dark and glittering.

“Okay, this is a tourist area so it’s pretty safe, but we should still stay together while we walk back,” Dr. Louis said.

“Now it  _ really _ feels like Scandal,” Maisie said.

“What’s Scandal?” Tim asked. “I think I’ve heard of it before but like what is it?”

“It’s a TV show Leihai’s super into, about this woman Olivia Pope who like, fixes problems for important people in politics and has an affair with the president of the United States. It’s very intense. I’ve seen a few episodes but I don’t care enough about it to watch the entire thing.” There were a few scenes set at night in the parks, and those were the ones Maisie was reminded of.

“What shows do you like to watch? Actually, what shows does everyone like to watch? We could have a marathon.”

“Parks and rec!” someone shouted, and someone else said “yeah!”

“Fresh off the Boat,” said Tim. “Yes!” 

“The Crown, on Netflix,” Ellen said. “It’s not really interesting but it’s super soothing and like, pleasant to have on as background noise.”

“Boring,” Sal said, and everyone laughed.

“I really liked Pretty Little Liars when it was big,” said Dominique. “But like now I’ve mostly just been watching How to Get Away with Murder.”

“I don’t watch a lot of TV,” Maisie said, looking to the side. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a complete season of any TV show...”

Ellen suddenly stopped walking. “Wait, I’ve got it. Galavant. It’s on Netflix and it’s so short we could easily watch the entire show in one night. It’s like, if Monty Python and the Holy Grail was a musical. It’s hilarious and wonderful and I love it. Has anyone else seen it?” She looked around. In the dim light of the street lamps, she could make out looks of blank confusion on the science club member’s faces. 

“Great. We’re watching it.”

So they went back to the hotel and watched Galavant with Ellen’s netflix account. And it was great. 

“I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this as much as I did,” Steve confessed. “I’m not a big musicals person.”

“I’m not either, but this is hilarious, right?” Ellen exclaimed. “Everyone shush now, this is my favorite scene.”

The noble knight sir Galavant and King Richard had found their way to the Enchanted Forest, a gay bar in the middle of the woods, where the evil queen had captured Galavant and removed his shirt in a hilariously campy musical number, “off with his shirt!”

“I’m too straight for this,” Sal muttered, horrified as he watched the synchronised dancing on screen.

“Too insecure in your sexuality, you mean,” Dominique fired back, laughing. “It’s not a crime to admire these abs.” 

Then followed a conversation where King Richard found his uncle Kenny, and failed to realize that when Kenny said he “belonged here,” what he meant was he was extremely homosexual.

“Do you belong there, Robert?” Matt asked, raising his eyebrows meaningfully. Robert pushed him off the bed. “Rude!”

At 11:30 everyone went back to their rooms for a bit, but then regrouped in Sal’s room to keep watching the show and hang out and enjoy themselves. Ellen and Maisie ended up squished together on the floor at the foot of the bed, with a good view of the TV. Maisie tried her best to focus on the show, but all she could feel was Ellen’s face being painfully close. When the two lead characters kissed and then sang about how terrible it was as far as kisses go, Maisie wondered if her first kiss was going to be as awful as that.

“Ellen,” she whispered. “Have you ever kissed anyone?”

“Don’t you remember the Never Have I Ever game? No,” she said.

“Informal poll,” Sal yelled. “All those present who have kissed other people: how bad was your first kiss when compared to this musical number?”

“Better,” Dominique said.

“Probably as bad,” Imraan said.

“Maybe slightly better but not by much,” said Ankita.

Rish and Tim made faces and failed to contribute.

Everyone else just looked at each other and shrugged. They kept watching. “Far from the world’s best kiss, still I can tell you this: it was a kiss I won’t forget...” 

The next morning was the awards brunch banquet in the large dining hall. Everyone was expected to dress formally and get crumbs of their walnut-encrusted french toast and flaky pain-au-chocolat pastries all over their beautiful suits and ties. Representatives from NASA and the Department of Energy and the National Parks Service were all present. At each place setting was another gift bag, this time containing medals of participation for every competitor in addition to other random National Science Competition goodies. 

The list of awards was projected in a slideshow form onto a screen in the front of the room, but first there were opening speeches to get through. The high school students listlessly checked their phones while the announcers droned on and on about the importance of science and science education of the youth in this day and age, and then, finally, finally, the slideshow was live and the announcer began: For Anatomy and Physiology, tied for fourth, we have...

The Pineborough group was silent and anxious, looking at Sal and Steve with concern as more and more names were called and none of them were from New Jersey. Maisie had her spreadsheet pulled up and ready to record names in case anyone actually won anything, which for some reason suddenly looked extremely unlikely. Maybe when they said “not good,” they actually meant not good...

“And in first place, Pineborough High School from New Jersey!” 

For a shocked split-second, no one said anything. Then, half the table erupted in cheers. Sal and Steven stood up slowly, looking surprised and perplexed.

“YOU FUCKERS,” Dominique yelled. “NOT GOOD AT ALL, THEY SAID. TOTALLY BLEW IT, THEY IMPLIED. Go get your fucking medals, nerds. I can’t bear to look at you.”

Astronomy was next. Maisie couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t see anything, couldn’t breathe. Her spreadsheet was abandoned. She picked a spot in the center of the tablecloth and stared at it, hoping it could stick her to this realm so she didn’t float away from sheer panic.

“Tied for second place, we have Pineborough High School from New Jersey and...” the second name was drowned out by the cheering at the Pineborough table. Maisie felt someone yank her up and shove her towards the front of the room, but distantly, as though encased in a glass wall. Somehow, she made it up there, obtained a medal, posed for a photo, and returned to the table, but it all felt like it was happing in another world.

Only after the applause had died down and everyone was waiting for the next event did Maisie look at the gleaming silver disc in her hand and say, very softly, “holy shit.”

The team placed in most of their other events, generally third or second. Very respectable. Eventually, after what felt like days but was probably more like half an hour, they reached Write it Do it.

“And in first place, we have Pineborough High School from New Jersey!” 

The team was hoarse from yelling so much, but they yelled anyway. Maisie and Ellen both jumped up this time and high-fived on their way to the podium.

“We did so good,” Ellen said.

Maisie smiled. “Yeah, we did.”

The last slide was a scrolling list of all the school’s rankings. Pineborough was in the top ten this time. 

“We haven’t done that well in years, fam! Nice job!” Sal exclaimed, high-fiving everyone around the table. “I’m going to tell my friend on the school newspaper to write about this.”

The bus ride home, everyone slept. Around ten minutes away from the school, Dr. Louis stood up at the front of the bus and told everyone to call their parents and let them know it’s time to pick them up. “No skipping school tomorrow, either,” she said. “I have half of you in my classes and you all have labs to work on tomorrow. Besides, it’s not that late right now, you have plenty of time to get a good night’s sleep.”

“We love you, Dr. L!” Sal yelled. Everyone laughed, tiredly.

“Man, back to school already,” Maisie said. It felt like she’d lived an entire second life in the last four days.

Ellen yawned and stretched. “I know right? And we have to make up like two days of work...”

“Yeah.” Maisie checked the time on her phone. It wasn’t even six in the evening. “Are your parents picking you up or were you planning on walking home?”

“Walking. It’s not that dark or cold outside right now, and it’s not like it’s a super long walk or anything either,” Ellen said. “And I only have one suitcase and a backpack, so.”

“I’ll walk with you,” Maisie offered. She didn’t have too much stuff either, they were only gone for a few days anyway.

Ellen looked at her for a moment, then smiled. “Okay.”

They waved goodbye and told the rest of the team they’ll see them in school, and went home. 

“When’s the next Trial supposed to be again?” Ellen asked, when they were crossing the train tracks.

“Couple of days, I think. I kinda forgot about the whole thing these past few days,” Maisie confessed.

“Same.” They both fell silent, thinking of the testing to come. The gravel crunched under their feet.

“Well,” Maisie said, when they reached their houses. “See you tomorrow, I guess.” 

They stood there, looking at each other, and then Ellen dropped her suitcase and grabbed Maisie in a slightly awkward, squishy hug.

“See you tomorrow,” she mumbled, grabbed her bag and went home.

“Well, that was stupid,” Ellen said to herself, when she was safely inside and her door was closed.

“What was stupid, dear? How was your competition?” asked her mother, poking her head out of the kitchen.

“Nothing, mom.”

Maisie flopped on her bed and checked her phone. There were a handful of unanswered texts from Leihai, all variations on the theme of “are you back yet I have to TELL you a THING”. She grabbed her pendant, something she had avoided doing at Nationals because of the lack of private space. 

“What’s up? Congrats, by the way. You did great,” Astaroth said. His familiar, heavy grumbling voice soothed Maisie’s nerves immediately.

“Can I tell Leihai about everything? Like, everything everything?”

“Never said, you couldn’t, did I? You decided that on your own.”

“I want her to stay my best friend. I don’t want her to think I’m crazy or something. Can you meet her with me?”

“Sure, kiddo.”

Maisie picked up her phone and texted back, “okay, when r u free? I have stuff to tell u 2”

There was a science club meeting after school on Monday to update the club members who didn’t get to go to Nats on what went down, and to go over plans for the end-of-the-year party and team bonding excursions. Leihai, as usual, had frisbee practice. It was decided that Maisie would meet Leihai at the frisbee field after Science Club and they’d walk back to Maisie’s together. 

“alright cool cool! c u then! :D :D” Leihai replied, and Maisie threw her phone on her bedside table with an exhausted sigh. 

“I am going to sleep forever,” she announced, and then went to sleep. 

The next day, Maisie ducked out of the meeting a few minutes early while Ellen wasn’t looking and crossed over to the frisbee field. Leihai waved at her and then went back to talking to her captain about something. 

“Hey!” Leihai said, coming over to where Maisie was standing awkwardly on the edge of the field. She chugged some gatorade. “It’s not even 50 degrees outside and yet, I am still sweaty and gross. The miracle of modern exercise.”

“Ha. Yeah.”

“How was Nationals?”

“Pretty great, I won silver for Astro and then gold for write it do it with Ellen. That’s actually related to what I wanted to tell you. Uh. Remember back in 6th grade, we had that science fair project we had to do and I did mine on stars? Well, when I went to the library to look for stuff on stars, I found this weird book...”

The walk home was no more than 15 minutes on a good day, but this time, the two girls stopped walking when they reached the shortcut across the train tracks. Maisie told Leihai about everything- the years of summoning demons, the pendant, the trials, Ellen’s deal, absolutely everything. Leihai, to her credit, didn’t interrupt or say anything, just kind of stared.

“Don’t freak out or anything, but I have proof,” Maisie said. She pulled the pendant out of her shirt- still small and smooth and black as the abyss- and whispered to it. 

The air thickened and swirled, a thunderstorm of brimstone and hellfire brewing in fron of them.  _ Astaroth’s really hamming it up this time,  _ Maisie thought with some amusement.

He appeared, ten-feet tall, muscled and horned and still wearing that stupid “Team Maisie” t-shirt. Next to him, the air shimmered gold for a second, and Stolas appeared as well, looking like a considerably more dignified long-legged owl with a crown. 

“Sup,” Astaroth said.

“Hi,” Leihai squeaked. She looked absolutely terrified. “So. You’re a thing.”

“Yup.”

“Okay,” Leihai said, breathing out slowly. “This is pretty cool. Why doesn’t everyone do this?”

“It gives you mental health problems,” Maisie explained. “Or worsens the ones you already have. Like, a lot of my anxiety and perfectionist tendencies can be directly attributed to this entire thing.”

“Oh. Yikes.”

“Yeah.” Maisie turned to her demon friends. “Thank you for coming.”

“No prob, Bob.” They vanished, with far less fanfare this time around. 

Maisie turned back to Leihai. “Also, Steve from Science Club asked me to prom and I said yes but just as friends.”

“WHAT!” Leihai held out her hand for a high-five, and Maisie obliged.  “Oh my god! Nate from frisbee asked me to j-prom too! We can get ready together, it’ll be so much fun.”

“Haha, yeah. We should go dress shopping together, too, I have no idea where to even start...”

They resumed walking again, still talking about prom. The conversation pursued the prom tangent for a while, then, Leihai said, “so why did you clarify that it was just as friends? Do you like someone else? Was I right about the secret internet boyfriend all along?”

Maisie smacked her on the arm playfully. “Not a secret internet boyfriend, but like....yeah.... I think.....” she trailed off.

“Who, who, who?” Leihai jumped up and down, pestering her.

“I’d rather not say,” Maisie said, distinctly uncomfortable, looking off to the side.

Leihai gasped. “Is it Ellen?”

“How the fuck. Is it that obvious. Jesus Christ.” Maisie hid her face in her hands. 

“It’s not that obvious, I promise. It was just a lucky guess. Anyway, that’s awesome and I support you whoever you happen to like and whatever gender they happen to be.”

“Thanks, Lei.” They kept walking. Maisie stared at the gravel under her feet, and kicked a pebble. “I was thinking of telling her after the trial.”

“Good idea. Do you know if she’s straight or not?”

“I don’t know. We never talk about that sort of thing.”

“There you go,” Leihai said triumphantly. “You’re both just scared and have other things to worry about first. But then the trial stuff is going to end and you’ll both be free to talk about feelings.”

She turned around and faced Maisie head on. Even though Leihai was several inches shorter than Maisie, she was far more intimidating. “You absolutely have to talk about your feelings, Maisie. No excuses. No keeping this inside and pining when you don’t fucking have to. It’s better to have a certain no than to languish in the oceans of maybe forever.”

“Did you get that from a John Green novel, jeez,” Maisie snapped back reflexively. But she softened. “Thanks, though.”

“Yeah dude. We are best friends forever and giving helpful advice is part of the job.”

They reached Meadow Park. Leihai hugged Maisie quickly. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Maze. Is the trial going to be like, after school or something?”

“Probably? They pull us out of time for them. Like, we’re taken to another location that may or may not actually exist and hours go by for us, and then we’re dropped back into the same time and place we were in before. But it’d be a dick move to do that before or in the middle of the school day when we’ll definitely be tired after. They didn’t tell me what it was going to be or when it was going to happen exactly,” Maisie explained.

“Well, good luck anyway!”

“Good luck on your frisbee scrimmage!” Maisie yelled back, and they both went back to their respective houses. Maisie felt drained, exhausted, but also lighter, like after a long-overdue haircut. She suddenly realized that now, when she felt like she was overflowing, she had a choice of who to go to with her problems.

The trial ended up happening right after school. As in, the last bell rang, and with the sound Maisie felt herself being sucked into some kind of black hole, tight and twisting and painful. Maisie squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the trip to be over. It wasn’t nearly as long or tumultuous as the previous teleportations, though, which was nice. Her feet landed on a smooth, cold floor, and Maisie opened her eyes. The room was blindingly bright, if it even was a room. Space, perhaps. She was reminded of the King’s Cross scene in the last Harry Potter book, but there was even less detail than that, it was just white, with the barest shadows to indicate the presence of a ceiling, a floor, and walls, somewhere fairly far away. Ellen was standing several feet away, holding her backpack in one hand, locking eyes with Maisie and smiling grimly, like, “this again, eh?” The moment they made eye contact, a divider wall slammed down in between them, cutting off contact.

“What is this?” Maisie asked the air. Her old friend, the shimmering pillar of light and voice, responded, “Ellen will be writing instructions for you on how to build a model of a certain building out of pieces we have provided. We’ve given her an hour to write these instructions, and you will have the same hour to build it.”

“The same hour?” A strange turn of phrase, Maisie thought, but then a piece of paper with carefully typed instructions floated down in front of her.

“Time is a construct. You and Ellen are not in the same time right now, because We can do whatever we want.”

Maisie blinked. “What-”

“I’d advise you not to waste your time thinking about it,” the voice interrupted. A pedestal rose from the ground in front of her covered in transparent, oddly shaped building blocks, thin strips of metal, screws, and other fixtures Maisie was pretty sure she’d never seen before. A large, glittering gold and crystal hour glass floated down gently, with the sand trickling slowly as it lowered. “You may begin.”

Maisie looked at her materials. She looked at her instructions. She whispered, “Yikes.” And got to work.

“Well,” Maisie said, when the last grains of sand were running through the hourglass. She examined her construction, and reread the instructions that were given her. What she had come up with looked like a futuristic glass cathedral, definitely not something she’d seen before, but also, she was certain in her heart, completely right. She snapped the last spire into place, and stepped back.

The wall between her and Ellen slid upward again, and the glowing light pillar thing appeared in front of both of them. “Well done,” it boomed. 

There was an awkward pause while they waited for Barachiel and Astaroth to shimmer into existence.

“Damn, Maze, did you build that? Kick-ass,” Astaroth said, pointing at her construction. “You got this in the bag.”

Barachiel picked up the instruction sheet in Ellen’s hands and murmured reassuringly at her. “Very well-written, clear and deliberate, I am proud of you.” She flushed, embarrassed.

“So like,” Maisie began, “who won?”

If a pillar of light with no facial features or even a face could smile indulgently, this one did. “We must admit to having deceived you. There was no competition. It was fron the start a lesson in how the world needs both heavenly and demonic forces to remain in balance, and how working together and cooperation accomplishes greater things than working alone or working against each other.”

Barachiel and Astaroth looked at each other, identically aghast expressions on both faces. “Are you freaking kidding me,” they said, in unison.

“You made me drive my CHILD to the brink of a nervous breakdown to PROVE A POINT?” Barachiel yelled at the pillar of light.

“Technically, her blessing prevents her from health problems, including mental health, so a nervous breakdown wouldn’t have happened in any case,” the pillar pointed out placidly.

“THAT DOESN’T MAKE IT OKAY,” Barachiel yelled.

Astaroth watched calmly as the angel and the light being argued, then put a clawed, massive hand on Barachiel’s shoulder. “Dude, chill,” he said. “Let’s go have a drink.”

Barachiel stopped and stared. “Drink what? Sulfur?”

“Alcohol. I’m sure you have that in Heaven, right?”

Barachiel looked up. “Actually, I have a bottle of communion wine somewhere,” he mused. “And, heaven knows, I do need a drink after all this.”

“Fucking fantastic, let’s go.” Astaroth dug his claws into Barachiel’s shoulder, and the two of them teleported somewhere unknown, presumably for a drink.

With that, Maisie and Ellen were thrown back to where they were before: in the hallway, a minute after school let out, surrounded by swarming teenagers on all sides, trying to make it out of the school now that science club meetings were over for the year and there were no other after school commitments for either of them. Ellen made it to the doors first, and stood to the side a little and waited for Maisie to join her so they could walk back.

“They could’ve dropped us off at home and saved us some energy,” Maisie grumbled, as they started walking.

“That would’ve been nice,” Ellen said mildly. They passed the frisbee field, but it was empty. Today’s scrimmage was at another school. Maisie pulled out her phone and texted Leihai “good luck!”

It was still the middle of March, the weather still brisk if not painfully freezing cold. But the trees were turning green again, and little white and purple flowers were pushing themselves out of the ground. It looked like a world filled with hope, with promise, with renewal. 

“So what now?” Maisie asked, her gaze fixed on the road in front of her. “Now that we don’t have to work together or against each other anymore. Are we going to stop being friends?” She didn’t realize she was worried about that until the words had left her mouth, and then immediately wanted to shove them back in there. 

Ellen puffed out an incredulous laugh. “Are you kidding me? AP tests are in two months. You’ve registered already, right? Who’s going to study with me for those? Steve? Steve doesn’t know how to get me to focus when I get distracted or what kind of practice tests help me the most. Steve doesn’t know what to doodle in the margins to get me to remember a concept. You’re literally the only person who I can study with for anything now, because you already know everything about my studying and learning habits there is to know.”

She looked at Maisie this time, and smiled, blushing slightly. “And yes, that means we’re friends now.”

And Maisie took a deep breath, and moved closer, and whispered, “or maybe...more than friends?” 

And Ellen looked at her, and tilted her face up, and whispered, “maybe more than friends.”

It was far from the world’s best kiss. It wasn’t the kiss of the ages, it wasn’t the kiss heard around the world. But it was a promise. And as far as first kisses go, it was one neither of them would forget. 


End file.
